17 August 2026

Secondhand booksellers report mysterious bulk orders suspected to be from AI firms

Since May, independent bookshops across the UK, Ireland, US, and Australia have received large orders for seemingly random assortments of books from anonymous buyers, breaking the normal pattern of thematic purchases.
Booksellers report buyers are paying top prices without negotiating discounts and using opaque aliases, with multiple orders sometimes shipped to the same warehouse near London's Heathrow airport.
The orders follow reporting that Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, spent tens of millions of dollars buying books and destroying them by removing spines to scan their contents for AI training data.
Secondhand books published before 2022 are valuable to AI companies because their text predates chatbots and is not online, making them fresh training material for developing language models.
Anthropic says it does not buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books, while some AI firms like OpenAI are working with Harvard to scan older books without destruction rather than pulping them.