20260723 - AI vendors destroying rare books to feed the chatbot

Strip-mining the world of old books 

This episode written by Amy Castor and David Gerard 

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/07/23/ai-vendors-are-destroying-rare-books-to-feed-the-chatbot/ - blog post 

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Sources:

• Order on Fair Use (PDF) https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.434709/gov.uscourts.cand.434709.231.0_1.pdf
• Inside an AI start-up's plan to scan and dispose of millions of books https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/
• Zoom blog (archive) https://web.archive.org/web/20260622203623/https://zoombooks.ca/blogs/category/ai-training-books/
• Zoom Books Responds To Accusations of Selling Books For AI Scraping https://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/2026/05/zoom-books-responds-to-accusations-of-selling-books-for-ai-scraping/
• AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/
• How Authors Are Fighting Back Against AI Training, And What It Means for Your Data Strategy https://isbndb.com/blog/ai-training-data-poisoning/
• The Receipt is the New License: Print Books Sourcing for AI Training https://isbndb.com/blog/print-books-sourcing-ai-training/
• Recovering After Gen AI Webinars https://stopgenai.com/mymeeting/

Previously on Pivot to AI:

• Anthropic AI wins broad fair use for training! — but not on pirated books https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/24/anthropic-wins-broad-fair-use-for-training-but-not-on-pirated-books/
• video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwoScPzTWiA&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA
• Anthropic AI pays off authors with just $1.5 billion https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/09/07/anthropic-ai-pays-off-authors-with-just-1-5-billion/
• video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14Tr930opuI&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA

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