AI firms bulk buy books for destructive scanning, investigation finds

AI companies appear to be bulk-buying used books across Europe for destructive scanning, according to a new investigation by South Korea's Chosun Ilbo, as demand for original human-written text grows for training large language models.

In May, an order for 5,000 books arrived at Kennys Bookshop in Galway, Ireland, with no price negotiation and an odd mix of titles, a selection the owner called a "bananas order." Bookstores in Berlin have received overnight orders worth tens of thousands of euros, and similar bulk purchases have been reported in Australia and Catalonia, Spain.

Bookstore owners say the orders appear to be generated by software that buys books automatically by ISBN, with shipments routed through a logistics hub before being sent to the U.S. in bulk, a pattern they suspect points to AI companies.

The report ties the purchases to Anthropic's "Project Panama," revealed in January by the Washington Post from court documents, which explicitly aimed to "scan books worldwide in a destructive manner."

The method is straightforward and wasteful: used books are bought in bulk, their spines are cut with hydraulic cutters, pages are digitized with industrial high-speed scanners, and the paper is recycled.

Anthropic reportedly invested tens of millions of dollars to secure millions of books; one external contractor's proposal covered digitizing 500,000 to 2 million books within six months, with Better World Books and World of Books listed as suppliers.

The practice follows a landmark legal backdrop: a U.S. judge ruled Anthropic's use of books for training was transformative fair use, though downloading pirated e-books was not; Anthropic then settled with authors and publishers for $1.5 billion, approved in July, in the largest copyright class-action settlement in U.S. history.

For the publishing industry, the concern is cultural as much as legal. Cutting spines and discarding physical copies erases the marginalia, signatures, and historical value embedded in printed books, even as those same books become a prized resource for teaching machines to write.