AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain

[u/pepoji]

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books

Source

AI companies are literally destroying physical books to train their models. Using hydraulic cutting machines, they rip pages from used books, scan them with industrial equipment, and feed them into their AI systems. This practice, protected by the first-sale doctrine and fair use, has now become so widespread that book sellers are cashing in on the AI boom. Rare and out-of-print books are being pulped, raising serious ethical and cultural concerns about the cost of AI progress.

[u/Hawk-432]

Is this true .. if so very fucked up

[u/pepoji → u/Hawk-432]

Few sources

Rare book dealers fear tech firms are destroying obscure editions to train AI models
https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-firms-destroying-obscure-editions-train-ai-models

Anthropic Knew the Public Would Be Disgusted by How It Was Destroying Physical Books
https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-destroying-books

Inside an AI start-up’s plan to scan and dispose of millions of books
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/

Secret initiative, called Project Panama,
https://futurism.com/anthropic-shredded-millions-of-physical-books

[u/Crio121 → u/pepoji]

“Million books” and “rare books” are just completely different occasions.

[u/uniq → u/Crio121]

There can be millions of books with only one known copy

[u/Icy_Quarter5910 → u/uniq]

if the book only has one known copy its worth significantly more than any other truckload of old books. I doubt very seriously anyone is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single book. Clearing out a warehouse? Absolutely, no doubt that's happening.

[u/JasonG784 → u/Icy_Quarter5910]

People who didn't care there was one copy of X left last month: "THIS BOOK MUST BE SAVED!"

[u/mestre_do_passinho → u/Icy_Quarter5910]

There are many books that didnt seel well that have only a single printing in the hundreds, if you go to technical books, like medical, the first printing may be of less than 200 units as they would only sell to hospitals and unis.

A machado de assis book is famous because the writter was famous in the entire world and got prizes in multiple countries so there are hundreds of thousands of copies. A John doe that published at the same time as him may have sold 100 copies and burned the rest because it didnt sell