In January the Washington Post read 4,000 pages of unsealed court filings and found Project Panama: Anthropic's programme, running since early 2024, to buy secondhand books by the tens of thousands, cut the spines off, scan the pages and recycle the paper. In the company's own words, an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world". By July, rare-book dealers from Sussex to Galway were reporting bulk orders for unrelated titles from buyers who would not give a name.

This week I argue that the receipts tell you what the press releases will not. There is no defensible IP in a large language model. The best open-weight models trailed the closed frontier by about four months in the first half of this year, and on Thursday Anthropic themselves reported Chinese labs copying Claude's capabilities through 151 million exchanges with the model. A capability that can be siphoned out through an API is a service you rent, not a patent you hold. Synthetic data has a floor, and the floor is human, so the labs are buying the only fuel that works, and Anthropic's cheque book has moved from researchers to records: four acquisitions since December after almost none in four years, plus two more by the services venture it launched in May.

Then the markets. SpaceX floated in June at roughly 94 times trailing sales and has already fallen back. Anthropic, at a $65 billion run rate, are targeting a $2 trillion October listing, a little over 30 times revenue. I separate the multiple from the revenue forecast, the one-off settlement from the recurring costs, and total compute spending from unit costs, and ask what a business whose fuel has stopped being free is worth at a software multiple.

Also this week: my Yorkshire Post column on the free games LinkedIn and Bloomberg want you to play every morning, and the layoff tracker, where a quiet week is not a recovery, Layoffs.fyi has passed 2025's full-year total, and Oracle's staff are counting their colleagues on Slack.

Read the full issue with every source at thesundaysignal.ai

Anthropic, Project Panama, AI training data, data moat, book scanning, Bartz v Anthropic, copyright settlement, fair use, Judge Alsup, model collapse, synthetic data, distillation, Alibaba Qwen, open-weight models, Kimi K3, Epoch AI, data licensing, News Corp, Reddit, Anthropic IPO, SpaceX IPO, valuation, revenue multiple, Oracle capex, tech layoffs, Neo Financial, LinkedIn Queens, data privacy, David Richards, The Sunday Signal