Secondhand booksellers suspect AI firms are behind 'strange' bulk orders

Secondhand booksellers across the UK and Ireland are puzzled by ‘strange’ bulk orders from mystery buyers, and many suspect AI companies are behind them. The Guardian reports that shops have been flooded with purchases of random, unrelated titles — the kind of buying that makes little sense for any ordinary dealer or collector.

Barter Books in Alnwick sold ‘hundreds’ of unrelated books to three buyers for a total of about £4,000, including an Estonian translation of a John le Carré novel and a 1983 issue of a warships magazine; a seller in Ireland has fielded large, varied orders since May; and one UK bookseller reports orders for 6,000 books since January, delivered to freight warehouses near Heathrow. The buyers pay top prices and rarely haggle.

The sellers’ theory: AI companies are acquiring the books to scan before pulping them. The Washington Post reported this year that Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, spent tens of millions of dollars buying books, slicing off their spines so contents could be scanned before recycling. Anthropic says none of its data-acquisition programmes buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books. Booksellers note that volumes published before 2022 are prized as training data because their text is unpolluted by machine-generated material.