Court filings tie Anthropic's book purchases to AI training

Booksellers in the United States and Ireland say they have been filling anonymous orders for hundreds and sometimes thousands of obscure titles, and court filings in a copyright case against Anthropic point to artificial intelligence firms as the likely buyers.

Zachary Green, who handles special collections at Second Story Books in the Washington area, told Washingtonian on August 13 that the orders began at the end of last year and ran to as many as 100 volumes at a time. Most were university press editions, academic texts and general-interest nonfiction, and almost all had been published between the 1970s and the 2020s. Green said he has had no orders for genuinely rare titles, and now reviews every title in a large order. Second Story's president is Allan Stypeck.

Washingtonian noted that the books almost all date from after ISBNs began assigning trackable numbers to individual titles, the standard arriving in 1970, and from before AI systems started generating text of their own. Many are arcane volumes that were neither rare nor valuable, only slow to move, the sort of backlist a shop might keep for a decade before a single copy sells.

The pressure to fill orders

Robert Harper, who runs My Dead Aunt's Books in Hyattsville and sells some 36,000 titles online, said platforms including Amazon, Biblio, Alibris and eBay assign fulfillment rankings to their sellers. A cancelled order, even a partial one, can pull that ranking down, and a ranking that falls too far removes a seller from the platform, taking away the channel a small shop depends on to reach buyers. Harper said he has sold between $30,000 and $50,000 of older academic texts since January.

If I cancel two out of 100 books in an order from Amazon, I will be cut off as a seller. I can't think about it morally or ethically, I have to fill the orders.

The orders have kept Harper's store afloat at a time when the large purchases he once relied on from universities have thinned as campus budgets tightened amid funding cuts. A pattern that began as a nuisance has become a revenue line the business cannot easily turn down. Not every dealer has seen it: the Antiquarian Book Shop in Georgetown, run by Susan Hale, reports no unusual orders at all.

The trade is split over what to do. Susan Benne, executive director of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, said some dealers oppose any sale that could feed an AI model, on principle rather than price. She also noted there is no precedent for booksellers vetting who buys from them: when an order comes in, a dealer does not usually ask what will happen to the book afterwards. The association had already formed a working group on AI before the destructive-scanning reports appeared.

Orders that arrive overnight

Kennys, a bookshop and online retailer in Galway, told The Irish Times on August 10 that it received a single online order last May for 5,000 often obscure titles, a volume the shop called bananas and that no ordinary reader assembles. Dealers in Berlin described a different pattern, orders arriving by email in the middle of the night worth between 10,000 and 50,000 euros at a time. Booksellers in Germany, Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands have reported similar approaches.

The industry calls the process destructive scanning. Thousands of physical books at a time have their spines sliced off and their pages digitized, and what is left is destroyed, according to The Irish Times, which described the practice as feeding paper books into the models that sit behind chatbots. The physical copy is spent in the act of turning it into training data.

Writing in The Irish Times on August 14, the columnist Liz Carolan argued that building an AI system draws on four inputs: computing power from chips and data centres, technical work from engineers, energy, and data, most of which is the product of human creative labour. Companies have been willing to pay for the first three, she wrote, and to treat the fourth as something to be taken. Anthropic has in fact paid for books on both counts, spending what the court called many millions on print copies and settling the piracy claims for $1.5 billion.

Judge William Alsup wrote in June 2025 that Anthropic 'could have purchased books, but it preferred to steal them,' avoiding what its chief executive Dario Amodei called the 'legal/practice/business slog.' That passage is about the company's downloading of pirated libraries in 2021, not about the books it later bought from shops. Anthropic began buying print copies in 2024 precisely because it had stopped using pirated ones.

What the filings describe

The details emerged in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, a copyright case in the Northern District of California brought by the authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. Filings in the case describe an effort called Project Panama, in which Tom Turvey, a former head of partnerships for Google's book-scanning project, was hired in February 2024 and tasked with obtaining all the books in the world. An internal memo in the docket describes Project Panama as an effort to destructively scan all the books in the world, adding that the company did not want it known it was working on this.

The project was meant to build what filings called 'a central library of all the books in the world to retain forever,' from which the company could draw 'various sets and subsets of digitized books' to train the large language models behind its AI services.

The court described how Anthropic 'came to value most highly for its data mixes books like the ones' written by the plaintiffs 'because of the creative expressions they contained.' Claude's customers wanted it to write 'as accurately and as compellingly' as those authors, using 'well-curated facts, well-organized analyses, and captivating fictional narratives.'

What Anthropic says

An Anthropic spokesperson said, 'None of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.' The company drew a line between rare and valuable collectibles, which it said it does not target, and the harder-to-find professional or reference titles that make up much of the bulk buying described by dealers.

What the ruling leaves open

Alsup granted summary judgment to Anthropic on two points in June 2025: that training the models was fair use, and that converting lawfully bought print books to digital was fair use, because it added no new copies and the company had 'purchased its print copies fair and square.' The pirated digital books were another matter. He refused to treat them as training copies and sent them to trial, and that claim produced a settlement of $1.5 billion, given final approval on July 20, 2026 by Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, who took over the case after Alsup retired. The money covers the pirated copies. Nothing was awarded for books scanned from copies the company had bought. Alsup also declined to rule on copies made from the central library for uses other than training, saying the record was too thin.

The bulk purchases cut both ways for booksellers, clearing inventory that had sat unsold for years while raising the fear that irreplaceable works could be pulped without anyone weighing what is lost.

What the shops cannot say is who, exactly, is buying. The orders came in anonymously, and neither Second Story Books nor Kennys said it had confirmed the identity of the purchaser. Reporting has pointed to the catalogue service ISBNdb as an intermediary, and to Better World Books and World of Books among the used-book sellers Anthropic bought from. The link to AI firms rests on the shape of the orders and on the court record, not on a name attached to any one sale.

The economics underneath

The Irish Times column framed the purchases as a shift in the economics of publishing, with physical books turned into an extraction resource for the technology industry. The argument ran that buying and pulping printed copies costs an AI firm less than compensating the writers whose work trains its models, and that the difference is the whole point.

An internal Anthropic memo quoted in the coverage described the goal plainly: 'Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world... we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.'

The ambition set out in the filings, a library of every book to be kept forever, sits oddly against the scenes at the shops filling the orders. A dealer in Washington ships 100 volumes at a time, a shop in Galway thousands, and each order arrives as nothing more than ordinary commerce.

For the dealers, the choice is narrow. Refusing an order to keep books from a shredder risks the platform rankings that decide whether a shop can sell online at all. Some in the antiquarian trade would refuse anyway.

The legal question over purchased-and-scanned books has, for now, been answered in Anthropic's favor. The cultural one has not. Booksellers, authors and their associations remain divided over whether a sale that ends in a shredder is a lifeline for a struggling shop or the quiet loss of the printed record.