Thousands of rare books are disappearing from European antique shops as companies linked to the development of artificial intelligence tools buy and scan them en masse to train new AI models. Then they physically destroy them
According to the American, German and Swiss media, since the spring of this year, antique dealers in Europe have started receiving unusually large orders. book from the company "Zoom Books" which is registered in Kanadi. They mostly buy professional literature published in the seventies of the last century, they are less interested in fiction. They buy dozens, even hundreds of books from one seller.
The books are first delivered to temporary warehouses in Germany, from where they are transported to Canada and the United States.
The "Washington Post" writes that a large part of the books end up in the process of "destructive scanning", which means that the binding is removed from the book, the pages are digitized at high speed, and the physical copy is then recycled, i.e. it is permanently destroyed.
This American newspaper also states that the company "Anthropic" is the creator AI of the "Claude" system as part of the "Project Panama" project spent tens of millions of dollars on the purchase and processing of millions of printed books.
In the documents that the "Washington Post" had access to, it is stated that experts who previously worked on the "Google Books" project were hired for the project, due to their experience in the mass digitization of books.
The Canadian company "Zoom books" has officially denied participating in the digitization and destruction of books for the purposes of developing a language intelligence model.
However, some associations publisher in Europe they are already looking for clearer rules on the use of author's works for system development artificial intelligence.
At the beginning of the year, thousands of writers also published an "empty book" called "Don't steal this book" as a sign of protest against AI companies using their work without permission and compensation.
"Don't Steal This Book" does not contain text inside the cover, only a list of authors. Among the writers who participated in this project are the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory, Richard Osman.
This book was published a week before the Government Great Britain was supposed to present an estimate of the economic costs of proposed changes to copyright law.
On the back cover of the "blank book" there is also a message that the UK government should not legalize the use of books for the benefit of artificial intelligence training companies without the author's consent.
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The debate in London was further fueled by the Government's proposal to allow companies to use protected works copyright, unless they request an exemption from that process.
This proposal caused negative reactions from a number of artists, including singer Elton John and actress Julianne Moore, who criticized the possibility of relaxing copyright laws.
On March 18, the UK government dropped plans to allow artificial intelligence companies to use copyrighted works without permission from the authors.
Biban Kidron, the MP who led opposition to the proposals in the House of Lords, said at the time that "nothing but political will stands in the way of allowing artists to see how and where AI companies are using their work, which would pave the way for them to be compensated".
In December 2025. Amazon has added an AI feature to the Kindle that allows readers to "talk" to a book. Many authors criticized the feature, fearing that AI models were being trained on copyrighted content, without permission or compensation.
Amazon responded at the time that the book content was not used to train the underlying model, but that it saw the tool as an "extension of the search functionality that already exists in Kindle."
Legally speaking, AI companies have scored significant victories. In a June 2025 ruling on a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit filed by authors against Anthropic, U.S. Judge William Alsap ruled that the use of protected works to train AI models falls under the doctrine of "fair use."
In similar lawsuits against the companies Meta and Stability AI, the courts generally sided with the companies.
Some cases are still pending. Like the class-action lawsuit filed by authors and media companies like the New York Times, where a court ordered OpenAI to share 20 million chat logs with prosecutors in the discovery process. OpenAI said the case was without merit and that the use of publicly available information was "fair use".
Sources: News online, The Guardian, Clavis Bizz Press
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