A mysterious demand sweeping secondhand bookstores worldwide... what's the reason?

The used book market is experiencing an unusual surge in purchases, as independent sellers in Britain and other countries have received large orders comprising a diverse range of titles, from old novels to academic books and rare texts, raising questions about who is behind them.

The BBC reported that some book sellers suspect that companies working in the field of artificial intelligence may be buying these books to digitize them and use their content to train language models, although the final destination of many orders has not been directly confirmed.

These suspicions are bolstered by legal documents that revealed a previous project by Anthropic, the developer of the “Claude” robot, which involved purchasing millions of paper books, digitizing them after removing their covers and binding them, and then recycling the original copies.

In 2025, an American judge ruled that using legally obtained books to train artificial intelligence could fall under “fair use,” but distinguished this from books obtained from pirated sources.

The phenomenon is raising new concerns about the fate of rare books, authors’ rights, and the legal and ethical boundaries of using published works to train artificial intelligence.