Legal Versus Trustworthy: What Anthropic’s Book Case Teaches Leaders
I got the email this week confirming my book, Achieve With Accountability, is part of a $1.5 billion settlement with Anthropic. It’s a good moment to sit with legal versus trustworthy, because this story is the cleanest example of that gap I’ve seen in years.
Last week, more than 4,000 pages of unsealed court documents revealed something Anthropic had spent two years trying to keep quiet.
The Operation They Tried to Keep Quiet
Internally, they called it Project Panama. Starting in early 2024, the company bought millions of physical books, fed them through industrial machines that sliced off the spines, scanned every page at high speed, and recycled what was left. No physical copy survived.
One internal planning document put it plainly, “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” Another line, from the same document: “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
They also hired the former head of partnerships for Google Books to help find a way, as one internal document put it, to obtain “all the books in the world.” Vendor proposals on the table, converting up to two million books in six months, roughly 11,000 books a day.
Two Sets of Books, Two Different Rulings
Here’s why they were being careful. Before the legal purchases began, a company co-founder had personally downloaded more than 7 million pirated books from shadow libraries to train the model. That’s the piece I’m part of. When it came to light, a judge ruled the piracy was not fair use. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion, roughly $3,000 per book, across close to half a million works, the largest copyright settlement in history. My book is one of them.
The destructive-scanning operation, the legally purchased books sliced apart and shredded after scanning, was a different question entirely. The same judge ruled that part was fair use. His reasoning: digitizing a book you already legally own, without keeping a duplicate or redistributing it, is just a format change. No new copies. No new harm.
Legally, that’s defensible. I’m not here to relitigate a federal judge’s ruling.
Legal Versus Trustworthy: What the Ruling Didn’t Settle
But here’s what I can’t get past. A company that actually believed its own legal reasoning would have said so, out loud, from the start. Instead they gave the project a codename and wrote, in their own internal documents, that they didn’t want it known. You don’t hide something you’re proud of. You hide something you’re afraid people won’t accept, even if a court eventually agrees with you anyway.
Ask the actual question underneath the legal one. If Anthropic had come to every author whose book they wanted, mine included, and asked first, would most of us have said yes? Maybe. Probably, even, for a fair number of us. I might have. But nobody asked. The choice to skip asking, and then to make sure nobody found out, is itself the answer to whether they thought we’d say yes.
That’s legal versus trustworthy in one sentence. A judge decides what’s legal. Trust gets decided somewhere else, by whether the people affected feel like they were dealt with honestly, and by whether a company’s first instinct, under pressure, is disclosure or concealment.
Trust works the same way for a person as it does for a company worth tens of billions of dollars. It’s built slowly, through years of consistent small actions, and it’s destroyed quickly, through one significant breach, once that breach comes to light. Anthropic didn’t lose in court, the ruling on Project Panama itself went their way. What they may still lose is something bigger, every author, journalist, and skeptical customer now reading their public statements about safety and ethics through a different lens. That’s the real cost of legal versus trustworthy. The legal case closes. The trust question doesn’t.
A Personal Note on Legal Versus Trustworthy
I’m one of roughly half a million authors finding out, after the fact, that our work helped build the thing we’re now being told to adapt to or get left behind. Not because anyone asked. Because a lawsuit forced 4,000 pages into daylight.
Legal Versus Trustworthy: The Leadership Lesson Underneath the AI Headline
This applies whether you’re running a frontier AI lab or a mid-size regional business: the moment you find yourself designing something specifically to avoid it being known, you already have your answer about whether it’s the right call. Legal counsel can tell you what you can get away with. It can’t tell you what your people, your customers, or your own conscience will make of it later, especially once “later” arrives in the form of 4,000 unsealed pages.
You don’t need to run a frontier AI lab for this to apply. Any organization sitting on a practice it would rather not explain publicly, a policy, a shortcut, a decision made quietly because leadership assumed nobody would ask, is running the same experiment Anthropic just ran. Legal cover doesn’t survive public disclosure. Only genuine trustworthiness does.
DISTINCTION and LEADERSHIP AT ALL LEVELS, two of the five ingredients in the Kryptonite Defense, aren’t just about standing out. They’re about being the organization whose first move, under pressure, is toward disclosure instead of away from it. That’s a harder standard than “technically legal.” It’s also the only one that survives contact with the truth once it comes out. And it always comes out.
Where would your organization’s internal planning documents land if a court unsealed them tomorrow?
This is the LEADERSHIP AT ALL LEVELS and DISTINCTION ingredients of the Kryptonite Defense in action, laid out in full in Distinct or Extinct, the complete framework for building the kind of trust that survives scrutiny instead of avoiding it. See where your organization stands: realmikeevans.com/scorecard
Distinct or Extinct: Future-Proofing People and Organizations on the Age of AI is now available on Amazon.