AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale

AI firms are reportedly buying large batches of used and rare physical books, scanning them for model training, and then discarding the originals.

The report points to Anthropic’s settled lawsuit over book-based training and claims ISBNdb may now help arrange anonymous bulk book sales to AI buyers.

Booksellers say they are seeing unusual orders, possibly including rare or out-of-print titles, raising alarm over lost cultural material.

The practice could accelerate the disappearance of hard-to-replace books while deepening legal and ethical disputes over AI training data.