WHY ARE AI COMPANIES BUYING PHYSICAL BOOKS?
AI companies have turned to using physical books because digital sources to train LLMs caused two major problems: legal liability and data quality. Using pirated online book archives, or “shadow libraries,” has exposed AI firms to massive copyright lawsuits from authors, artists, photographers and news outlets. But buying physical books legally entitles the owner to use that specific copy however they see fit—including to destroy it. The practice also gives access to millions of out-of-print, niche or specialized books that exist only in physical form. By buying books printed before 2022, companies can also guarantee they’re using text free from AI interference to train their models. The internet is now full of pages written by AI, and training new models on that text won’t allow it to become any smarter. But physical books offer human-authored (and highly edited) language, long-form coherent reasoning, narrative structure and other qualities short-form web pages and AI-generated text do not.
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IS IT LEGAL?
Yes. First-Sale Doctrine of the Copyright Act is what allows the buyer of a physical book to destroy it if they so please. Other lawsuits decided that converting a lawfully purchased print book into a digital file for internal model training is a “transformative” fair use. Critics have argued companies are using physical ownership as a legal loophole to manufacture digitized datasets without compensating creators, but the practice remains legal.
HOW MANY BOOKS HAVE BEEN DESTROYED?
Nobody knows. Court documents unsealed during the Anthropic case revealed the company planned to scan between 500,000 to 2 million books over a single six-month vendor contract. Internal documents said it planned to “destructively scan all the books in the world.” 404 Media sources reported anonymous orders ranging from 1,000 to 1 million books per purchase. Used booksellers in the U.S., U.K., and Europe report bulk orders for seemingly random non-fiction and out-of-print books routinely range from hundreds to thousands of titles per transaction.
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CRUCIAL QUOTE
“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal Anthropic planning document said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
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