AI firms are still buying out-of-print books by the pallet and destroying them after scanning.

Reporting resurfacing on HN (739 points, 468 comments) and mainstream outlets documents bulk purchases of rare and out-of-print books, destructive scanning, then pulping. ISBNdb reportedly brokers anonymous orders from 1,000 up to a million titles, with buyers prioritizing pre-2022 publication dates specifically to avoid AI-generated text contaminating training corpora. The legal cover is Judge Alsup's June 2025 ruling in Bartz v. Anthropic, holding that digitizing legally purchased print books for LLM training is fair use; Anthropic's internal "Project Panama" document described the goal as "destructively scan all the books in the world." Booksellers note the asymmetry: the last surviving copies of an 18th-century text aren't replaceable once shredded.