Bulk used-book orders raise questions over AI training

Independent booksellers around the world have reported a surge in large, hard-to-explain orders for secondhand books, ranging from obscure Latin texts to cowboy novels. Barter Books owner Stuart Manley said one order from a Canadian company matched what he would expect to sell in seven days, a pattern he said he had not seen in 30 years in the trade.

Suspicions have focused on AI training after a US court ruling involving Anthropic. In 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s use of purchased books to train AI software was “exceedingly transformative” and did not violate US copyright law. Unsealed documents later showed books were destroyed in the process of training Claude and referred to an internal effort called Project Panama, with documents indicating an aim to “destructively scan all the books in the world”. Anthropic said Claude is trained on public web data, commercial datasets and internally generated data, and said its acquisition programs do not buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.

The boom has created an ethical dilemma for sellers. Some welcome sales of long-unsold stock, while others worry about the possible destruction of scarce works, including books published in only 100 copies or surviving editions from the 18th century. Manley said recycling unwanted books can make sense, noting that the world no longer needs five million copies of The Da Vinci Code, and that some books advertised for 20 years have only now sold.