Report: AI firms buy and destroy physical books after training on them

A new report alleges AI companies are secretly buying up physical books through middlemen, scanning them for training data, and then shredding the copies. The practice reportedly spans millions of books across multiple AI developers.

Why it matters: This adds a strange physical-world wrinkle to the fight over training-data provenance: buying and destroying a physical copy may be an attempt to establish a legal basis for use that pure digital scraping lacks. It surfaces as the New York Times' copyright suit against OpenAI drags on, underscoring how contested and creative training-data sourcing has become.