Anna's Archive seeks volunteers to scan books before AI firms destroy them

A volunteer campaign for the shadow library Anna's Archive is calling for people to scan and upload physical books, arguing AI companies increasingly buy, scan, and destroy books to feed AI models rather than digitizing them non-destructively. The group frames it as a race against permanent loss of some physical copies.

Why it matters: This adds a physical-preservation angle to the ongoing fight over AI training data and copyright: beyond legal disputes over text scraping, it claims some AI firms are consuming the only surviving copies of certain works outright. It's a reminder that the data fueling large models isn't infinite or free of real-world cost.