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There is a widespread pattern of book dealers receiving bulk orders from anonymous, price-insensitive customers suspected to be AI companies seeking training data.
The host establishes the background context for the story, noting ongoing reports from booksellers about unusual bulk purchases by unidentified buyers. ✦ AI generated
host · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-08-17 · original ↗
For a while now there have been stories of book dealers receiving orders for large volumes of books from apparently price-insensitive anonymous customers, widely suspected to be companies looking to scan them for AI training.
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gives example → 404 Media tracked a large bulk order of approximately 1,000 books from a bookseller to an Amazon facility using an Apple AirTag.host · Simon Willison's Weblogprovides context → Amazon workers have confirmed via online forums that the VGT3 section of the facility is used for the destructive scanning of large volumes of books.host · Simon Willison's Weblogprovides context → Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement reveals their hypocrisy: they train on all creators' output without permission but call it IP theft when Chinese companies do the same to them.David Sax · All-In Podcastprovides context → We are not currently in an AI bubble, largely because the market is supply-constrained (compute, memory, data centers, power) rather than demand-constrained, though that could change within a few years.David · a16z Podcast