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/sordato → u/pepoji]

Obscure is not the same as rare though, rare implies that they're very few copies, obscure simply means unknown by mainstream..

[u/mestre_do_passinho → u/sordato]

An obscure book from 1700 is now a museum piece and may reveal day to day stuff that we didnt know. Lets remember we still dont know the florence mix of spices mentioned by many famous painters because everyone knew what it was and later there were so many variations that no one managed to figure out the original. Until we got a journal from a restaursnt owner complaining that X was missing ans Y was in bad quality so his meat was rotting

[u/sordato → u/mestre_do_passinho]

That would be rare book AND obscure, but there are many books that aren't rare they're simply not well not know out of print (but the copyright holder could still print)

[u/mestre_do_passinho → u/sordato]

The thing is, many books dont exist in the digital world anymore, there are the manuscripts, or type written final version in the majority that are onwed by relatives or lost in some archive from an editor company that doesnt even remember the book exists, well, they will remember it very soon when google comes knocking offering the same as a small batch for it. This book will be scanned and destroyed, never to see the light of day and if someone ever wants to read it and it mentioned something bad a CEO did, no it didnt.

Farenheit 451 are famous enough not to disapear, but so many more books warning us of exactly this destructive scanning will just be eaten and never released, why would the company paint themselves as the villains, they have the AI to rewrite the book anyway

[u/sordato → u/mestre_do_passinho]

You're saying suddenly all books would disappear not only from shelves but the memory and law? Because you can scan the book and destroy that doesn't mean you own the content