AI companies are anonymously purchasing rare and antique books through middleman services, extracting their contents to train models, and then destroying them—even unique editions with few existing copies. The practice raises concerns about irreversible loss of literary heritage.
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futurism.com/artificial-i... AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.
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ai companies are destroying books. all you need to know
Just in case you guys wanted another reason to hate AI: AI companies are buying rare/old/one of a kind books and destroying them in order to scan them to train AI. Anthropic specifically had a detailed internal document on this dallasexpress.com/national/the... AI companies are bulk-buying rare and out-of-print books, scanning them, then destroying the originals for training data.
The original article is www.404media.co/ai-companies... But it's paid which is why I linked the other ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”
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New report reveals that AI companies are buying up physical books to train their LLMs and destroying them in the process.
www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8tbghp6/ AI companies are buying rare and original books by the millions to use them for training and then destroying them! TikTok video by darrenfrancisfinance
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I read that the AI companies buy old books and scan them while destroying in the process. So, rare books are now disappearing irreversibly, because they will be accessible only through AI slop that was produced with them. This saddens me gravely. At the same time, I cannot do anything about it. Which further overwhelms me. (They destroy books because it's faster like that. There is no intent, but
pcgamer reporting this 😭😭😭 www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/... Booksellers say they're facing a sudden surge of orders for seemingly random rare books—and fear they might be profiting from their destruction.
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AI Companies MASS SHREDDING Rare Books www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c8p... YouTube video by Breaking Points
www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8tt4My8/ AI companies buying original and even antique books and then destroying them so they can take credit for authorship?? TikTok video by owq43c74
#Ai companies are distorting millions of books even rare books #FuckAi youtube.com/shorts/UrGjT... YouTube video by ItsLuke
AI companies are committing cultural genocide. #AI #genocide #books https://novaramedia.com/2026/07/29/ai-firms-are-buying-up-old-books-then-scanning-and-destroying-them/ The world’s biggest AI companies are buying antiquarian books en masse so they can be scanned to train their large language models (LLMs) before being destroyed.
AI companies are buying millions of books, "harvesting" (downloading) them, & then destroying the books. Why? Because once the books are harvested & destroyed, & AI regurgitates the data, there’s no way to find out if they're lying. READ BOOKS FOR YOUR LIFE! eve1125442.substack.com/p/fahrenheit... The above is one shelving unit of books in my house.
Just a reminder, old books you have you might want to keep Lest forbidden knowledge be destroyed and rewritten ◆ Emerald Pages ◆ Technology / Culture Why AI Companies Are Destroying Original Literature to Train Their Models Emerald Book Publication July 29, 2026 5 min read In a desperate scramble for clean dat...
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> During the Anthropic lawsuit, Tom Harvey, who previously participated in the creation of Google Books before leading Anthropic's "Project Panama" digitalization project, confirmed that the AI firm hired several document scanning companies. Datamation Information Services, which offers high-volume, non-destructive, and destructive book scanning services, was one of them. The former method employs
apple.news/AgBeNvW1IRDm... Booksellers say they're facing a sudden surge of orders for seemingly random rare books—and fear they might be profiting from their destruction.
AI companies are offsetting their high energy demands by burning *checks notes* rare books. Delightful. 🤦