AI Firms Are Buying Up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them
News AI Firms Are Buying up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them ‘We don’t want it known that we’re doing this.’ by Tom Midlane 29 July 2026 CEO and Co-Founder of Anthropic Dario Amodei. Credit: Denis Balibouse/Reuters 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 material, the Washington Post reported earlier this year.
- ▪News AI Firms Are Buying up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them ‘We don’t want it known that we’re doing this.’ by Tom Midlane 29 July 2026 CEO and Co-Founder of Anthropic Dario Amodei.
- ▪Credit: Denis Balibouse/Reuters 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 material, the Washington Post reported earlier this year.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 22 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ AI companies are scanning and destroying old books — Boing Boing
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| Original publisher | Novara Media |
| Canonical URL | https://novaramedia.com/2026/07/29/ai-firms-are-buying-up-old-books-then-scanning-and-destroying-them/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:00:37 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-31T11:02:42.550Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-31T11:02:42.550Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zUptPOWucjVC · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
News AI Firms Are Buying up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them ‘We don’t want it known that we’re doing this.’ by Tom Midlane 29 July 2026 CEO and Co-Founder of Anthropic Dario Amodei. Credit: Denis Balibouse/Reuters 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 material, the Washington Post reported earlier this year.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Novara Media.
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