AI firms are quietly buying up secondhand books by the thousands. Some are being destroyed to train chatbots.
A US court ruling cleared Anthropic to use purchased books for AI training. Now booksellers report a strange surge in sales of obscure titles, and court documents reveal a project with a goal to 'destructively scan all the books in the world'.
Key points
- A US judge ruled in 2025 that Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, could legally use purchased books to train its AI without violating copyright law.
- Internal Anthropic documents, unsealed in 2025, revealed a programme called "Project Panama" with a stated aim to "destructively scan all the books in the world".
- Destructive scanning physically removes a book's spine so pages can be scanned rapidly, after which the remains are recycled.
- Secondhand booksellers across the UK report a sharp rise in bulk purchases of obscure and rare titles, with buyers giving no explanation for the orders.
- UK copyright law, unlike US law, requires the permission of the copyright holder before books can be copied for AI training.
Something odd is happening in the secondhand book trade. Titles that have sat unsold on shelves for two decades are suddenly flying out the door. Obscure Latin texts. Cowboy novels nobody asked for. Academic monographs printed in runs of a hundred copies.
Neil Manley, who runs Barter Books in Northumberland, told BBC Technology he has no way to explain the surge. "No rhyme or reason," he says. The sales are random, the buyers anonymous, and the pattern points in one direction: artificial intelligence companies buying books in bulk to feed their systems.
What is actually happening to these books?
Some are being destroyed. Court documents unsealed in 2025 from a lawsuit against Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot (a large language model, the technology that powers AI assistants like ChatGPT), revealed that the company ran an internal project called "Project Panama." Its stated goal was to "destructively scan all the books in the world."
Destructive scanning means exactly what it sounds like. A book is shipped to a facility, its spine is cut off so the loose pages can run through a high-speed scanner, and what remains is recycled. The book is gone.
| Programme detail | What the documents say |
|---|---|
| Internal name | Project Panama |
| Method | Destructive scanning (spine removed, pages scanned) |
| Stated goal | "Destructively scan all the books in the world" |
| Books acquired via | Purchase on open secondhand market |
| Rare/antiquarian books | Anthropic says it does not buy these |
An Anthropic spokesperson said Claude is trained on a mix of public web data, commercially bought datasets, and data the company generates itself. "None of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books," they added, calling bulk book purchasing "a widely used approach across the AI industry."
That last point is almost certainly true. Anthropic is not alone here.
Why would an AI company want obscure old books?
Because weird, rare material is valuable training data. Large language models, the software engines inside tools like Claude and ChatGPT, learn by processing enormous quantities of text. Common books and websites have already been scraped repeatedly. Unusual texts, books no algorithm has seen before, can sharpen a model's understanding of language, history, and ideas in ways that another copy of a bestseller simply cannot.
Professor Emily Hudson, an intellectual property specialist at Oxford University, notes that the legal picture differs sharply on either side of the Atlantic. In the US, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of authors' books was "exceedingly transformative" and therefore allowed. In the UK, Professor Hudson says, the starting point is that all copying for AI training requires the copyright holder's permission.
Should booksellers be worried?
The mood among dealers is mixed, not panicked. David Tobin of Walden Books in north London welcomes the trade but says it "would be sad" if the books end up destroyed. Derek Walker, owner of McNaughtan's in Edinburgh, draws a line between expendable copies and irreplaceable ones. A rare 18th-century edition that has survived this long deserves better than a scanner blade.
Manley, for his part, is pragmatic. "The world no longer needs five million copies of The Da Vinci Code," he says. For those surplus titles, recycling via an AI pipeline is not obviously worse than landfill. The problem is that nobody buying these books is saying what they plan to do with them.
Common questions
Is it illegal for AI companies to buy and scan secondhand books?
In the US, a 2025 court ruling said Anthropic's use of purchased books for AI training was legal. In the UK, copyright law is stricter and generally requires the copyright owner's permission before text can be copied for any purpose, including AI training.
How can I tell if a book I'm selling might end up being destroyed?
You almost certainly cannot. Buyers operating these programmes do not identify themselves or state their intentions. If preserving a specific title matters to you, donating it to a library or archive is the safest route.
Are all secondhand books at risk, or just certain types?
Experts say AI buyers are drawn to unusual, obscure, and rare texts that provide material a model has not seen before. Common bestsellers are less likely targets, though nothing in the current system stops bulk buyers from purchasing any title on the open market.
