Used bookstores in the UK, Ireland, the U.S., Australia and elsewhere say they have been hit by unusually large, machine-like orders for unrelated titles, often from buyers in the U.S., Canada, continental Europe and the UK who pay full prices and do not haggle. The pattern has led several sellers to suspect AI companies are assembling pre-2022 books as "clean" training data for large language models, echoing reports that Anthropic's "Project Panama" used destructive scanning to build book datasets. The BBC said recently unsealed court documents described the effort as aimed at "destructively scanning all the books in the world," while 404 Media reported in July that millions of books, including some rare ones, had been destroyed after scanning. The legal context remains unsettled across jurisdictions: Judge William Alsup ruled in a 2025 U.S. lawsuit that Anthropic's purchase-and-scan method was "exceedingly transformative" and protected under U.S. law, but Professor Emily Hudson said UK law starts from the premise that permission is required. Booksellers say the demand is commercially lucrative but ethically uncomfortable, especially if precise requests for obscure editions and periodicals end with shredding rather than preservation, and no AI company has publicly tied itself to the current buying spree.