This Dutch bookseller thought a request for 3,000 copies was ‘spam or phishing.’ Instead, AI companies are scanning and destroying books to train AI

"I was shocked!" Pieter de Vries of Haarlem told Fortune. He said several other Dutch antiquarian booksellers received the same request.

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.  Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, has spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring millions of books to feed its demand for human-authored training mat

As a result of a legal loophole, AI companies have taken to sourcing rare books which they are subsequently scanning and destroying. And as people have highlighted, it could mean many texts are being lost to us forever: So AI labs are buying old books by the pallet, slicing them apart, scanning the pages, and […] By Wi