Secondhand booksellers in Britain and Ireland have reported an unusual wave of large, seemingly unrelated orders from opaque buyers, prompting suspicion that some physical books may be destined for artificial-intelligence training. The Guardian reported the development on Saturday, August 15, after contacting shops receiving orders from the United States, Canada, continental Europe and Britain. No evidence yet ties the specific transactions to an AI laboratory, and several named intermediaries have denied or not answered similar allegations.
Stuart Manley, co-owner of Barter Books in Alnwick, said requests began arriving about three months ago and lacked the themes common to ordinary collections. One order mixed an Estonian translation of a John le Carré novel, a particular edition of Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey and a 1983 issue of a naval magazine. He said three buyers had purchased hundreds of random books for about £4,000.
MW Books in Claregalway has received large varied orders since May, while BookLovers of Bath recorded a rush involving roughly 200 books between May and July. Another British dealer told the Guardian that similar buyers had ordered 6,000 books since January, paid full prices and sometimes used the same delivery address under different names. A postcode reviewed by the newspaper pointed to freight warehouses near Heathrow airport.
The pattern resembles reports from Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. Fortune documented a Dutch dealer's request for 3,001 ISBNs from a company identifying itself as 2077AI, but the message did not state how the books would be used and the company did not respond. Zoom Books, named in several reports, has described its business as book recycling and previously denied that its purchases were for AI scraping.
The suspicion has a documented industry context. Court records showed that Anthropic bought millions of physical books, removed their bindings, scanned them and discarded the originals to build a digital library. Anthropic says training Claude uses public web material, commercially acquired datasets and internally generated data, and says none of its acquisition programs buys or destroys rare or antiquarian books. ISBNdb separately said a webpage advertising bulk sourcing for AI training was only a test of market interest and that the service never launched.
Books contain professionally edited text, including older and obscure works unavailable online, making them valuable as developers seek fresh training material. Ingram Content Group told publishers this year that AI companies were increasingly buying physical books and offered an opt-out from known direct sales, while acknowledging buyers can be difficult to identify. For booksellers, the immediate effects are workload and disrupted inventories; whether the latest orders form part of an AI supply chain remains unverified and depends on buyers or marketplaces providing greater transparency.
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