In a Houston warehouse this spring, a family bookseller noticed something strange: sales suddenly doubled, then tripled. The orders came from the same buyer, and the titles were old, obscure, and mostly published before 2022. Across the country, an Ohio bookseller saw the same pattern. The answer, booksellers would learn, was not a wave of new readers but artificial intelligence companies, and the books were not being sold to be read, but to be shredded.
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Charlie Becker’s family bookstore has connected people with literature for more than 30 years, since his father opened the store for used and rare books in 1993. The industry has changed dramatically with the rise of the internet, digital cataloging, and major sellers such as Amazon. As a child, Becker watched his father rescue a collection of books bound for a landfill, and that story of saving books has stayed with him.
From The Epoch Times:
The practice of what has been dubbed AI “book shredding” came to public awareness after a 2025 court document revealed that AI tech giant Anthropic purchased millions of printed books, removed their bindings, then scanned each page into digital datasets. Afterward, Anthropic shredded and discarded the originals.
“Sourcing books is a widely used approach for training large language models across the AI industry,” an Anthropic spokesman told technology website Tom’s Guide. “None of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.”
“What I’ve been hearing is alarming. People are right to raise a red flag about it,” Susan Benne, executive director of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, told The Epoch Times.
The buying and destroying were part of Project Panama, an expansion of an Anthropic research library meant to collect every book in the world and retain them forever. Tom Turvey, a former head of partnerships for Google’s book scanning project, was hired to acquire material, and his team emailed major distributors and retailers about bulk purchasing print copies for a “research library.” Court filings from the Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit name Better World Books and World of Books among the vendors. Although a federal judge ruled that the destructive scanning of legally purchased books qualified as transformative fair use, book dealers say shredding books means losing not only words, but also cultural artifacts.
The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, a trusted source of rare and print books since 1949, has raised the alarm. Executive Director Susan Benne said the destruction of printed materials, even if they aren’t rare, strikes at something sentimental in most people. She compared book shredding to a flood or a museum fire that wipes out a repository of human knowledge, saying it hits the same nerve. Becker agrees, describing the practice as triggering a visceral reaction, and saying society loses something culturally when books are treated as expendable.
Still, Becker has been careful to clarify that not all the books being destroyed were rare. He observed that much of it amounts to common items, the sort of thing you’d find in a garage, like an old appliance manual. Benne agrees, noting that out of print does not mean rare, but insisting people should still be worried.
One of the greatest challenges to stopping the practice is a lack of transparency around who is buying large volumes of books. In July, a report flagged the book database ISBNdb for promoting print book acquisition services that would keep buyer information confidential. ISBNdb has since changed its website, saying it was exploring demand and has chosen to pivot away. A representative insisted the database had never purchased, scanned, or destroyed a book for AI training, saying there were no orders, no purchases, and no books.
Even if that is true, it is only one aspect of the issue. Benne noted that non-disclosure agreements can be involved when sellers work with big buyers, and it is not common practice to ask what a book will be used for. That lack of information is why Becker thinks it matters to know what books are being destroyed. He has said that no one really knows, and that part of the problem is that no one who cares about the nation’s literary heritage is in the pipeline.
Back in April, Becker noticed a spike in sales between double and triple his usual weekly tally. Working in the warehouse, which holds about 300,000 titles, he had a feel for what people order, so he looked closer. Of the last 100 book orders, 95 came from the same buyer, which struck him as very strange. He went online and found many people were talking about the same thing.
Benne had also heard murmurings throughout the print book community about a spate of orders a few months ago. The orders frequently involved older or obscure books, often published before 2022, which are valuable for training large language models because they are free of AI-generated text.
Benne highlighted some efforts to use AI more responsibly. Companies and nonprofits such as Project Gutenberg digitize materials for preservation, and she sees a big difference between digital cataloging and simply taking information and using it unethically. Becker shares that view, saying he does not despite AI itself, and that the issue is beyond siding for or against it. He is building an AI-powered cataloging platform for used and rare booksellers, describing it as a way of “safeguarding civilization.” Even Elon Musk has taken steps toward preservation, writing in July that he had asked an AI team to scan rare books the hard way rather than cutting off the spine.
The disclosure arrives at a time when public trust in the technology is plummeting. A recent Bentley University-Gallup survey found that an increasing number of Americans believe AI does more harm than good, and 73 percent don’t trust companies to use it responsibly.
As trust in AI falls, believers are left to consider what is being entrusted to the machines. Scripture reminds us that it is required of stewards that they be found faithful (1 Corinthians 4:2). The written word has carried truth, comfort, and generations of human memory, and the call to preserve it faithfully is not a small one. God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power, love, and a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7). Let us pray for wisdom for those who steward the written word, for integrity among the companies shaping how technology is used, and for a renewed love of literature and truth in the next generation. Let us also pray that as innovation advances, humanity remembers to preserve rather than discard, honoring the knowledge and stories that connect us to those who came before.
How are you praying about this issue? Share your prayers and scriptures in the comments below.
(Excerpt from The Epoch Times. Photo Credit: kb group / Canva Pro).
