AI companies are buying used books by the thousands. Some may be destroyed for training

Not too many years ago, before the dawn of Kindles, used bookstores were a refuge for budget-minded, voracious readers. As the industry evolved, many suffered. Now they’re seeing a resurgence in sales, but the customers increasingly aren’t bookworms. They’re AI companies. Barter Books, for instance, typically sells 2,000 to 3,000 books per week, which isn’t bad for a used bookstore in Northumberland, the least densely populated county in England. Recently, however, the owner got a bulk order from a company in Canada for that many books in a single day. Several other bookshops in the area are seeing similar demand. And while they can’t definitively say what the books are being used for, a recent court ruling offers a clue. The fate of those books may also be a dire one. AI companies have been in hot water with the literary world in recent months. Anthropic recently reached one of the largest copyright infringement settlements in history, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to more than 300,000 writers who filed a complaint against the AI giant two years ago. OpenAI, meanwhile, is still facing several copyright infringement lawsuits from a variety of sources, including The New York Times, Encyclopedia Britannica, comedian Sarah Silverman, and several nonfiction authors, who accuse the company of copying their books to train its large language model and saying OpenAI has “enjoyed enormous financial gain from their exploitation of copyrighted material.” The Anthropic suit, however, may have provided a path forward for AI companies. The court ruled that it was not illegal for Anthropic to train its AI on copyrighted works, as long as it paid for the books it used. A separate judge ruled similarly last year for Meta. Used books offer AI companies a cheaper way to acquire source material. Some publishers might also refuse to supply copies directly to an AI company if they know what it plans to do with them. The Anthropic suit highlighted a program at the company called “Project Panama,” which Anthropic described as its “effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” A memo highlighted as an exhibit in the trial explained that the company used a codename for the training method “because we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”