AI Companies Bulk-Buying and Shredding Rare Books for Training Data
round · x · 2026-07-28
According to industry observers, AI companies are using services to anonymously bulk-buy rare and out-of-print books. To extract clean data untainted by AI-generated text, these books are processed using high-speed scanners, a process that cuts the spines and destroys the original physical copies.
Pre-2022 books are considered premium training data, sparking significant ethical concerns. A federal judge previously ruled the practice as fair use, arguing that eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic has also reportedly hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
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