AI companies are destroying rare books for profit

As a result of a legal loophole, AI companies have taken to sourcing rare books which they are subsequently scanning and destroying. And as people have highlighted, it could mean many texts are being lost to us forever:

So AI labs are buying old books by the pallet, slicing them apart, scanning the pages, and pulping what's left. The orders are keyed to ISBNs and blind to scarcity. Nobody in the pipeline checks whether the book being shredded is one of the last copies on earth. Some of them… https://t.co/3WECoCQ7wG

— Brad Carson (@bradrcarson) July 27, 2026

AI companies carry out the modern book burning

In the past, tech companies attracted criticism for scanning other people’s work and using it to train their AI models. There are multiple ongoing legal cases regarding the legality of this practice. And it was actually a legal ruling which led to this current issue.

As the Hedgie account explained:

AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they’re free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain “all the books in the world.”

Once again, we’re seeing AI companies behaving in a fashion which is directly at odds with human morality. And they’re doing it solely for their own benefit.

The AI companies claim they’re working towards super computers which will take over the labour that’s currently undertaken by people. The reality is generative AI isn’t on a path towards super intelligence, and while it has some uses, it costs so much to run that the expenses far outweigh the benefits (something we saw recently when AI companies stopped subsidising their products with ridiculously low subscription prices).

Irreversible

Hedgie added:

This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.

ISBNdb’s website literally says “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy,” and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it “digital preservation.”

I’ve covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it’s irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can’t replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it’s legal. So it’s going to accelerate.

“We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out” is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie is far from the only one reacting with disgust:

Some things are just wrong. Some acts carry an inherent evil that makes any soulful creature recoil with disgust. https://t.co/WFx5QWEBBP

— Bad Writing Takes 🖊️🏳️‍🌈 (@BadWritingTakes) July 27, 2026

Generative AI isn’t just destroying our past; it’s also risking our future. Growing up with technology that thinks for them isn’t doing children any favours, and we’re yet to see what this will mean for them as adults.

Tech that acts as a surrogate brain sounds nice, but without intelligence – without history – we’re really not much more than meat.

Featured image via the Canary