Claims are growing that artificial intelligence companies have been buying second-hand books in bulk from used bookstores, using them to train their AI models, and then destroying the books.

Booksellers contacted by The Guardian, one of the United Kingdom's leading newspapers, said they had received orders from mysterious buyers in the United States, Canada, continental Europe and the UK, adding that the surge in demand appears to be global.

Earlier this year, The Washington Post, one of America's leading newspapers, revealed that Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, had spent tens of millions of dollars buying books, cutting off their spines so their contents could be scanned, and then sending the physical copies for recycling.

According to court records, the company's practice of purchasing second-hand books, digitising them through an industrial scanning process, and then sending the physical copies for recycling has also sparked ethical debate across the publishing world.

Yeni Asya English