AI companies are buying and destroying books

Anthropic 451

Opinion piece by Josep M. Ganyet citing the investigation as its starting point.

The mysterious company buying used books to train AI and destroying them

Investigation by Pol Pareja. Quotes Xavier Vinaixa as an AI expert and one of the people who pulled the thread on the case.

Zoom Books buys and destroys thousands of old books to train AI algorithms

Report in the Digital & AI section of Demócrata, the Madrid daily covering politics and institutional influence, also carried in its Catalan and English editions. It quotes Xavier Vinaixa as an AI expert explaining the «data wall»: once the free knowledge of the internet ran out, companies went looking for rare and marginal books to keep feeding their models, which triggered million-dollar copyright suits. It carries Marçal Font and Llibreria Fènix («I can get seven orders in a row from the same buyer a minute apart»), Miguel Ángel Ortega (UNILIBER) and Carlos Hernández (Mautalos bookshop, Madrid), the pattern repeated in Germany, the US, New Zealand and Australia, and the Anthropic project revealed by the Washington Post. It notes that Zoom Books removed from its website the posts explaining the destruction of books for AI training, though internal records show they existed. The company later publicly denied Demócrata's claims; the article is no longer reachable on the paper's site and survives only as an archived copy. The case originates in the investigation by Marçal Font i Espí and Xavier Vinaixa Roselló, co-authors of «The silent plunder».

Bread today, hunger tomorrow: a bookseller warns about the AI plan

National radio coverage. Xavier Vinaixa is cited in the audio segment.

Suspicious second-hand book purchases to train artificial intelligence

Report on «Tot es mou» (TV3) with Marçal Font (Llibreria Fènix) and Xavier Vinaixa (Sorensen) presenting the investigation on the studio set.

The antiquarian book trade warns about mass purchases of copies to train AI models

Report featuring the warning from UNILIBER (the antiquarian book association). Cites Xavier Vinaixa as an «AI expert who investigated the case» for the «data wall» concept.

Buying old books to train an AI and destroying them: booksellers' alert over suspicious orders

Report by Toni Noguera Martínez on 3CatInfo. Quotes Xavi Vinaixa (Sorensen.AI) on the «data wall»: the digitized data available for training is estimated to have already hit its ceiling. The report's reel went viral, surpassing 812,000 views.

The race to train AI threatens to destroy thousands of old books

Latin American pickup. Cites Xavier Vinaixa as an AI specialist for the concept of the «data wall».

A Canadian company buys Catalan-language books to train AI and then destroys them

Mexican pickup (Estadored.mx's «Proyecto 84» section) of elDiario.es's investigation into the purchase and destruction of books to train AI. It details Marçal Font's case (Llibreria Fènix, Badalona), the Canadian company Zoom Books, Anthropic's «Project Panama» and the «data wall» concept.

Artificial intelligence: the new digital extractivism

Opinion piece by Francesc-Xavier Soria Jofra in the Córdoba (Argentina) daily. Extensively cites Xavier Vinaixa and Marçal Font's investigation and reproduces their «Venice phase» passage.

The mysterious company buying used books to train AI and destroying them: «It's literary plunder»

The Argentine Institute for Economic Development (IADE / Realidad Económica) republishes Pol Pareja's report (elDiarioAR). Cites Xavier Vinaixa as an AI expert and Marçal Font.

«Literary plunder»: booksellers denounce the destruction of books to train AIs

Telenotícies (TV3) news piece on the booksellers' complaint over the destruction of books to train AIs; it picks up the case uncovered by the investigation and calls on the Ministry of Culture to step in to protect literary heritage.

From the bookshop shelf to feeding the algorithm: the controversial purchase of old books to train AI

Report in the Culture section of Informativos Telecinco. Quotes Xavier Vinaixa, technical director of Sorensen.IA: they already hold the information from many books but lack the legal permission to train on it — all they need is the invoice. Also features Miguel Ángel Ortega (UNILIBER) and Marçal Font (UB).

Booksellers sound the alarm: US companies buy old books to train AI and destroy them

Panel discussion on «Les coses grans» (Ràdio i Televisió d'Andorra) with Marçal Font (Llibreria Fénix), Toni Noguera (3Cat) and Oliver Vergés (Andorran Publishers' Association). Though not taking part, Xavier Vinaixa is cited several times as the author of the investigation that broke the case.

Destroying books to improve AI?

Explainer reel by the Mexican account Ruido en la Red (script by Yunava) on the purchase and destruction of books to train AI. Xavier Vinaixa appears speaking as an AI expert and explaining the case uncovered by the investigation.

Catalan booksellers worried after mysterious orders bound for the United States

Report by Suzanne Shojaei on «L'info du Sud» (ICI Roussillon, France's public local network). It picks up Catalan second-hand booksellers' worry over suspicious orders bound for the United States and quotes Xavier Vinaixa: these books were probably bought to train artificial intelligence.

Badalona's Fènix bookshop has received several suspicious book orders from a Canadian company

Report by Enric Garcia Torrell in Badalona's public media outlet on the case at the Llibreria Fènix. Quotes Xavi Vinaixa, technical director of Sorensen.AI, warning that the real danger will come when private companies digitize poorly protected books and that information vanishes from accessible databases.

Destroying books to train artificial intelligence

Report by Lara Gómez Ruiz in the Culture section of La Vanguardia. Extensively quotes Xavier Vinaixa, technical director of Sorensen.ai, and bookseller Marçal Font (Llibreria Fènix) on the investigation published on Substack. Features Vinaixa's proposal to charge these companies for the data and keep the heritage, and presents the Cedulari.cat project.

Destroying books: a training ground for artificial intelligences

Pickup by the French-language Canadian outlet LesNews. Extensively covers the investigation with Marçal Font («the real challenge isn't buying books but the coming tsunami; the heritage is in danger») and Xavier Vinaixa, featuring his proposal to «charge these companies for the data while preserving our heritage» and to create a consortium and database to protect cultural heritage. Points to Zoom Books and Anthropic's «Project Panama».

How are books destroyed to train AI?

Conversation on RTVE's «Cafè d'idees» with Gemma Nierga. Xavier Vinaixa, technical director of Sorensen.ai, and bookseller Marçal Font (Llibreria Fènix) explain how some companies buy books, train AI and then destroy them («They've hit a ceiling, there's no more data») and call for European data sovereignty in the face of the mass purchase of books to feed AI.

Catalonia: booksellers receive very strange orders for rare books

Report by Nicolas Gary in France's reference outlet for the book world. It picks up Marçal Font's (Llibreria Fènix) alert and the analysis of the suspicious orders published with Xavier Vinaixa, technical director of Sorensen.ai, pointing to the Canadian company Zoom Books.

AI firms buy, digitize and then destroy old books

Report by Swiss public broadcaster RTS (original by Sven Ahnert for SRF, French adaptation by Julien Furrer) following up the investigations by El Diario and Berlin's TAZ. Quotes Xavier Vinaixa, an «AI expert», on the «data wall» concept and the firms' rush to old books once openly accessible knowledge ran dry. Points to the Canadian company Zoom Books.

Old books shipped to America are allegedly destroyed after training AIs

Round-up by the French weekly Courrier international, pulling together the investigations by Switzerland's RTS, El Diario (Pol Pareja) and the German daily TAZ on the mass purchase and destruction of books to train AI. It builds on the case uncovered by the investigation and cites Marçal Font (Llibreria Fènix, Badalona), pointing to the Canadian company Zoom Books.

In Spain, second-hand booksellers plundered by AI

Report by Corine Chabaud in the French weekly La Vie (Groupe Le Monde). Cites both Marçal Font (Llibreria Fènix, Badalona) and Xavier Vinaixa, an «AI specialist computer scientist», who suspect Anthropic is buying second-hand books —through the Canadian intermediary Zoom Books— to train Claude and stave off its «cognitive stagnation». Recalls the «Panama project» revealed by the Washington Post.

Books digitized and then destroyed by AI companies

International press review by Catherine Duthu on France Culture (Radio France). It pulls together the investigations by Switzerland's RTS —spotted by Courrier international—, El Diario (Pol Pareja) and Berlin's daily TAZ on the mass purchase and destruction of books to train AI. Quotes Marçal Font, a Badalona second-hand bookseller, denouncing «a form of literary plunder», and points to the Canadian company Zoom Books and Anthropic's «Panama Project» revealed by the Washington Post.

Luz's rebellion: the bookseller who refuses to sell books to American AIs to save them from the shredder

Long-form Crónica reportage by Ferrán Barber in El Mundo. It builds on the investigation by Marçal Font (Llibreria Fènix, Badalona) and Xavier Vinaixa Roselló to explain the mass automated purchase of second-hand books from Spanish bookshops to feed AI. It covers Anthropic's «Panama project», the names Zoom Books and PrepFort USA, and Font and Vinaixa's warning about the critical phase to come: when bots go after the printed «intrahistory» not catalogued in the ISBN («We'll end up paying a Silicon Valley company to tell us what our great-grandfather said»).

From second-hand bookshops to the «data slaughterhouse»: millions of books fed to the robots

First Turkish-language coverage of the case, published in the World section of the digital daily Odatv (Istanbul) and bylined to the newsroom, with its own headline and framing built on Courrier international's round-up. It quotes Xavier Vinaixa as an «artificial intelligence expert» explaining the «data wall» (veri duvarı) technology companies face as freely accessible internet content runs out. It carries Marçal Font, the Badalona bookseller who spotted a Canadian company systematically buying near-unfindable Catalan books in orders a minute apart, and German bookseller Michael Ströter, who grew suspicious of Zoom Books over night-time orders for specialist books in German, Spanish and Bulgarian. It explains Anthropic's «Project Panama» —hundreds of thousands of books, close to two million by some estimates, unbound, scanned and then destroyed— and the «fair use» doctrine that requires owning the physical copy and destroying it after scanning. Zoom Books denies having digitised or destroyed any books.

When the internet's knowledge is no longer enough: AI sets its sights on second-hand bookshops

Report by Susana Pérez Soler in El País's Technology section. It reconstructs how the investigation began: the anomalous orders at Llibreria Fènix in Badalona and Marçal Font's call to his friend Xavier Vinaixa, a «researcher and technical director of a technology company», to pull the thread through to ZoomBooks, PrepFort (Illinois) and Anthropic's «Project Panama». Vinaixa explains why destructive guillotining is faster and cheaper than conservation-grade scanning, and why AI companies now need more diverse, better-written data as high-quality public text runs out. With Antonio Ortiz on model collapse and Patrícia Ventura on the privatisation of knowledge.

They buy second-hand books to train AI

Mexican coverage in the «Código Ciudadano» section, datelined Barcelona. It relays the investigation by Marçal Font (Llibreria Fènix, Badalona) and «researcher and technical director Xavi Vinaixa» into the anomalous orders that exposed destructive scanning of second-hand books. It names ZoomBooks, PrepFort and Anthropic's «Project Panama», framing the story around copyright and the concentration of human knowledge in private corporate repositories.

When the internet's knowledge is no longer enough, AI takes aim at second-hand bookshops

Portuguese translation of Susana Pérez Soler's El País report, published by the Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, the think tank of Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (São Leopoldo, Brazil). It introduces Xavi Vinaixa as a researcher and technical director of a technology company and carries his explanations of destructive guillotining and the exhaustion of high-quality public text, alongside ZoomBooks, PrepFort and Anthropic's «Panama Project».

Why are millions of second-hand books «disappearing», and what do AI companies have to do with it?

Report by María José Chitiva Londoño in El Colombiano's Tendencias section (Medellín), with its own headline and framing drawn from the El País and Washington Post investigations. It recounts how Marçal Font (Llibreria Fènix) spotted the anomalous order — «They bought four books from me for €35, with €67 of shipping… It made no sense» — and took it to his friend Xavi Vinaixa, director of a technology company, before pulling the thread with other European booksellers on an internet forum. It covers ZoomBooks, the Illinois intermediary PrepFort and Anthropic's «Panama Project», closing on the argument that the goal is not to democratise knowledge but to process it and send the books to the bin.

AI companies are buying tonnes of old books because they're free of AI slop. Then they destroy them

Report by John Tones in Xataka. It frames the case around human text «free of AI slop» as a scarce resource: it cites Xavier Vinaixa, «the researcher who helped break the case», and analyst Antonio Ortiz agreeing that the industry increasingly needs human text uncontaminated by AI to avoid model collapse. It points to Anthropic's purchase of out-of-print books through intermediaries such as ZoomBooks and ISBNdb and their subsequent destruction, following the 2025 ruling that requires destroying the copies to qualify as «fair use».

Second-hand books, AI's new target: a bookseller reveals how the scheme to digitise texts works

Report by Lilith Jaime in Milenio's Technology section (Mexico), with its own headline and framing built on El País's investigation. It explains how Marçal Font (Llibreria Fènix, Badalona) spotted the pattern of anomalous orders and pulled the thread with «technology specialist Xavi Vinaixa» through to ZoomBooks (Canada) and the PrepFort logistics centre (Illinois), and how the chain of intermediaries hides the final recipient. It covers Anthropic's «Project Panama» revealed by The Washington Post, destructive scanning and the argument that uncontaminated human content is the antidote to model collapse, closing on the privatisation of knowledge in corporate databases.

AI buys, scans and destroys second-hand books to train models

Report by Juan Fernández in Qué.es's Technology section, written and framed in-house. It carries Marçal Font's account (Llibreria Fènix, Badalona) of automated orders from a Canadian company arriving every minute, and sets it within the global circuit of booksellers in Barcelona, Germany, the US and New Zealand. It explains why books printed before 2022 are human text «free of AI slop», why Judge Alsup's June 2025 ruling pushes companies to destroy the physical copy to claim «fair use», and cites ZoomBooks, ISBNdb, Anthropic's «Project Panama», Miguel Ángel Ortega (UNILIBER) and Patrícia Ventura. The case originates in the investigation by Marçal Font i Espí and Xavier Vinaixa Roselló, co-authors of «The silent plunder»; the voice quoted in this piece is Font i Espí's.

From a Badalona bookshop to a Silicon Valley shredder: the unsettling journey of the second-hand books used to train artificial intelligence

Report by David Morán in El Periódico's Culture section, with its own video («Booksellers warn of mass purchases to feed AI models»). Marçal Font (Llibreria Fènix, Badalona) details the pattern of ZoomBooks orders bound for a logistics centre near Chicago airport, destructive digitisation («ripping off the spine to scan as fast as possible») and Anthropic's «Panama Project» revealed by The Washington Post. The piece frames the data-sovereignty proposal as coming «after studying the case in depth with AI specialist Xavier Vinaixa»: charging not for the books but for their content, by producing quality data packages and licensing them.

AI is buying up old books and readers may never see them again

First English-language pickup of the case, bylined Elli Freeman in the Euro Weekly News —the largest English-language newspaper in Spain, with around half a million print readers a week— built on El País's investigation. It carries Marçal Font and Llibreria Fènix in Badalona along with the detail that raised the alarm: four books sold for €35 with €67 of postage, and a second order moments later following the same pattern, always slow-moving specialist titles. It explains the ZoomBooks (Canada) route through US logistics operators with the final recipient unknown, the June 2025 federal ruling on Anthropic and «fair use», and Spain's text-and-data-mining regime with its rights reservation. Its own framing is the anglophone reader: the charity shops, market stalls and independent bookshops in Britain and Spain where local histories, technical manuals and regional cookbooks nobody will reprint sit gathering dust, and the argument that a scanned and destroyed book survives inside a private system but can no longer be consulted, leafed through or checked. The case originates in the investigation by Marçal Font i Espí and Xavier Vinaixa Roselló, co-authors of «The silent plunder»; the voice quoted in this piece is Font i Espí's.

Cultural barbarism: How AI companies are destroying the world's books

First coverage of the case by a British national newspaper and the first English-language report with reporting of its own —interviews in Haarlem and Badalona rather than a pickup of other outlets—, bylined Chris Stokel-Walker in The Telegraph. Marçal Font i Espí appears as the Badalona second-hand bookseller and University of Barcelona literature teacher, and is the voice explaining the «data wall»: as the web fills with AI-generated «slop», model developers are running short of fresh, human-made text. Font i Espí details the bursts of anomalous orders whose postage exceeded the value of the books, confirms the same pattern among booksellers in Germany, France, Spain and New Zealand, warns of the danger when what is bought is the last accessible copy of an obscure work, and sets out his position: «I'm not against AI. I understand that books and old knowledge must be transferred to new formats», but the goal must be to «digitalise it properly, not destroy the original document». The piece opens with antiquarian dealer Pieter de Vries (Haarlem), who received a list of some 3,000 titles from a «Nataly» at a company called 2077AI and assumed it was a scam, and reconstructs Anthropic's February 2024 hire of Tom Turvey with the brief of obtaining «all the books in the world». It carries 404 Media's ISBNdb revelation («the optics problem is real»), the California ruling that turns destruction into a legal advantage, Ed Newton-Rex (Fairly Trained), Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann, and Elon Musk's post asking the SpaceX AI team to scan rare books without cutting off the spines. The case originates in the investigation by Marçal Font i Espí and Xavier Vinaixa Roselló, co-authors of «The silent plunder»; the voice quoted in this piece is Font i Espí's.

Why are they destroying millions of books? They are going to rewrite the past and a judge has already authorised it

Twenty-two-minute video essay by digital-economy commentator Marc Vidal on his YouTube channel (1.19 million subscribers; over 285,000 views in its first week). It credits the origin of the case explicitly: «the pattern was uncovered in Europe by bookseller Marçal Font, of Llibreria Fènix in Badalona, and researcher Xavier Vinaixa, months before the story broke in the United States». It reconstructs the circuit —automated orders of out-of-print titles, postage double the price of the book, hydraulic cutter, production scanner and paper turned to pulp— and turns it into an economic argument: why paper printed before 2022 has become the most sought-after raw material in the technology industry, what the data wall and model collapse are, and how Zoom Books and ISBNdb operate in a market governed by confidentiality agreements. The legal core is a literal reading of Judge William Alsup's order in Bartz v. Anthropic: destroying a purchased book is free while pirating it ends in a $1.5 billion settlement —granted final approval in July 2026, at $3,100 per work across 440,490 claims— a perfectly inverted incentive. It closes by drawing the line from Google Books to the «Panama project» and tying the case to his earlier video on the 38% of the internet that has been erased. The description links the primary sources: Alsup's order as a PDF, the Authors Guild, Locus, JURIST, the Washington Post and 404 Media.

Fury as AI's hunger for data destroys rare books

Rewrite bylined Kenneth Glad in Dagens.com, the English-language international edition of the Danish group Mediegruppen Denmark, built on The Telegraph and 404 Media. It quotes Marçal Font i Espí —«a second-hand bookseller near Barcelona who also teaches literature at the University of Barcelona»— on digitisation being necessary but not at the expense of the original document. It adds an angle of its own: the physical book as an artefact preserving what a plain text scan does not —handwritten comments, inserted papers, repairs, unusual bindings and printing characteristics that reveal how a copy was produced, owned and read— along with the proposal of screening titles against library catalogues before destructive processing. It keeps the caveat that there is no evidence every unusual order reported by booksellers was destined for destructive scanning. The case originates in the investigation by Marçal Font i Espí and Xavier Vinaixa Roselló, co-authors of «The silent plunder»; the voice quoted in this piece is Font i Espí's.

Artificial intelligence companies buy and destroy millions of old books and unique editions

Spanish-language rewrite by the ARTEINFORMADO newsroom —an art-sector magazine based in Madrid and Barcelona, the «Ibero-American space for art», whose activity is funded by Spain's Ministry of Culture and Sport— built on The Telegraph and 404 Media. It quotes Marçal Font i Espí as the bookseller pointing out that AI companies have hit a «data wall» and need human-made material to train their models because the internet is saturated with AI-generated content, tying this to dead-internet theory and to bot accounts already outnumbering human ones. It carries Pieter de Vries (Haarlem) and the list of some three thousand titles from 2077AI, the ISBNdb service that lets buyers order up to a million books at once («the optics problem is real»), the «transformative use» doctrine endorsed by the California judge, and reactions from Elon Musk, Ed Newton-Rex (Fairly Trained) and Matan Grinberg (Factory AI). Its own angle is heritage: if the last physical copies are replaced by digital versions, the world is not merely digitising its history but handing over the last independent record of it, leaving the past to exist only as data that can be edited, filtered or deleted. The case originates in the investigation by Marçal Font i Espí and Xavier Vinaixa Roselló, co-authors of «The silent plunder»; the voice quoted in this piece is Font i Espí's.

The digital oligarchy against books

Column by Eric Calcagno in the «Escenario global» section of the Argentine cooperative daily Tiempo Argentino, subtitled: each corporation's AI «training» is a race to see who reaches the stock market first. It explains destructive scanning —industrial book buying, hydraulic presses and digitisation— and credits the discovery to «Marçal Font i Espí, a university teacher and poet who is also a bookseller in Badalona», who spotted unusual orders of Catalan books and, together with Xavier Vinaixa, «an AI specialist», reconstructed their worldwide scale; it points readers to xaviviro.com as its source. It places the same pattern among booksellers in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany, names Anthropic, Meta, Google and OpenAI, and carries the $1.5 billion figure from the authors' and publishers' litigation against Anthropic (Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, via CourtListener and the Washington Post). Its own argument is political: it equates the industrial destruction of books with ideological book burning and holds that a future without books serves corporate rather than social interests. The case originates in the investigation by Marçal Font i Espí and Xavier Vinaixa Roselló, co-authors of «The silent plunder».

Shredding the past to feed algorithms: AI's controversial crusade for human data

The case reaches the Chilean press: a rewrite by the El Ciudadano newsroom (Santiago de Chile) published across its Current Affairs, Art & Culture, Science & Technology and Letters sections, with its own headline, standfirst and framing and ARTEINFORMADO credited as its source. It presents «the Spanish bookseller Marçal Font i Espí» warning that the scarcity of clean data online has accelerated a voracious incursion into the bibliographic heritage that has not yet been digitised, alongside Pieter de Vries's astonishment at 2077AI's bulk orders. It explains the hydraulic press that severs the spine in seconds before industrial scanning, the data wall created by synthetic content from automated accounts, a California court's validation of the method as «transformative use», and the vast orders of up to a million books processed through intermediaries such as ISBNdb, with Ed Newton-Rex (Fairly Trained), Matan Grinberg (Factory AI) and Elon Musk. Its own argument is political and heritage-based: if the paper record disappears, the historical testimony is confined to private servers where information can be altered, filtered or deleted unilaterally, extinguishing any possibility of checking the past against independent sources. The case originates in the investigation by Marçal Font i Espí and Xavier Vinaixa Roselló, co-authors of «The silent plunder»; the voice quoted in this piece is Font i Espí's.

What the «Panama Project» is and how it revealed the destruction of thousands of old books to train AI

Feature by Matías Zibell for BBC News Mundo, the Spanish-language service of the BBC World Service, with its own interviews with both authors of the investigation. It is the first piece by a global outlet to interview Xavier Vinaixa Roselló directly, introducing him as «an artificial intelligence researcher and technical director of the technology company Sorensen.ai», and it reconstructs the origin of the case in his own words: Marçal Font's call from Llibreria Fènix on 30 April about orders with «odd patterns» —same customer, shipping abroad, paying three times the postage—, the initial suspicion of fraud, and the moment when, pulling at the thread, they found booksellers voicing the same concerns in Germany and New Zealand. Vinaixa explains what an LLM is, the titles that give the pattern away («the history of Catalan cured meats, things that surely have not been used for training yet»), the data-sovereignty proposal —«we scan our own heritage in our own language, we keep it and we license the data», retaining the book because for researchers the cover and the binding matter as much as the text— and the data-wall thesis: «We thought AI would hit its limit when compute ran out. It didn't: the ceiling is data». The piece frames the case within the «Panama Project» revealed by the Washington Post out of the Anthropic litigation —«our effort to destructively scan every book in the world», «we don't want it known that we are working on this»— and the $1.5 billion settlement, adding The Telegraph (Pieter de Vries, Haarlem), The Guardian (Delfina Manor, Victoria), Maximiliano Firtman as a plaintiff author, technology journalist Rodrigo Álvarez (TN) on destructive scanning, and Miguel Ángel Ortega, president of Spain's Professional Association of Antiquarian Books and Collecting. It closes with Font confirming a fresh order that same week: «The Panama Project is still running».

«Panama Project»: destroying old books to feed artificial intelligence

Newsroom piece by Grupo Megamedia for Diario de Yucatán —the dean of the Mexican peninsular press, published in Mérida— run in its Imagen section on the same day as the BBC feature. With its own framing it synthesises the coverage by Euronews (Craig Saueurs), BBC News Mundo (Matías Zibell), Deutsche Welle, The Telegraph and The Guardian to explain what the Panama Project is and why model training needs books written before the AI era. It reconstructs the origin of the case: the 30 April order at Llibreria Fènix in Badalona, Marçal Font —«also a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Barcelona»— spotting an odd buying pattern from a Canada-based company, and his call to «his friend Xavier Vinaixa, with whom he shared a passion for artificial intelligence», whose digging turned up identical cases in Germany and New Zealand. It adds Pieter de Vries (Haarlem), Delfina Manor (Victoria), Maximiliano Firtman as a plaintiff author and the $1.5 billion settlement. Its own angle is Latin American: while Silicon Valley burns millions buying and destroying books just to scan them, many public libraries and historical archives across Latin America are being lost for lack of budget to preserve or digitise them. The case originates in the investigation by Marçal Font i Espí and Xavier Vinaixa Roselló, co-authors of «The silent plunder».

Books destroyed to train AI

Newsroom piece by El Norte, Grupo Reforma's Monterrey daily, published with its own dateline in the Vida section and behind a subscription. It builds on the feature «published yesterday by Matías Zibell, of BBC News Mundo» and rewrites it for Mexican readers: the AI industry's race for training data has now reached second-hand bookshops. It explains that the case caught the attention of «Marçal Font, owner of Librería Fénix, in Badalona, Spain» when he received unusual orders from a Canada-based company, and that «Font consulted Xavier Vinaixa, an artificial intelligence specialist, and they found similar orders placed with other booksellers». It summarises the destructive method —cutting off the spines, high-speed industrial scanners and the remains sent for recycling—, the Washington Post court documents («destructively scan every book in the world», «we don't want it known that we are working on this»), the $1.5 billion settlement, Miguel Ángel Ortega's warning about what a physical copy holds and a transcription does not (annotations, ex libris, illustrations, binding, provenance), and the non-destructive alternative described by Rodrigo Álvarez (TN). It also credits The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Telegraph and WIRED, and closes with the fresh order Font received that same week: the case does not look closed. The case originates in the investigation by Marçal Font i Espí and Xavier Vinaixa Roselló, co-authors of «The silent plunder».

Panama Project: books in the bin

Rewrite bylined to Renata Rodríguez for NewsMx TV (Mexico), published in its International and Technology sections with its own headline, strapline («AI's secret plan that is destroying old books») and Badalona dateline. It follows the BBC News Mundo feature closely without crediting it, though it does point to The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Telegraph. It explains that the case first caught the attention of Marçal Font, of Llibreria Fènix in Badalona, when in April he received orders from a Canadian company with an odd pattern —several orders minutes apart, unusual quantities and buyers willing to pay high shipping costs—, and that, suspecting a scam, he «asked his friend Xavier Vinaixa, a researcher specialising in artificial intelligence, for help», with whom he found booksellers in other countries receiving identical orders. It details the court filing in the Anthropic case and the $1.5 billion settlement, the contrast between conservation-grade scanning (flatbed and V-shaped scanners) and destructive scanning (cutting off the spine, industrial scanners and the remains sent for recycling), and carries Miguel Ángel Ortega, president of Spain's Professional Association of Antiquarian Books and Collecting, on the difference between common and scarce copies and on everything a transcription fails to preserve: annotations, illustrations, bindings, stamps, ex libris, provenance and printing features. It includes Font's concern for everything that never had an ISBN —fanzines, clandestine publications, social-movement materials, countercultural literature and documents from minority communities— and Vinaixa's proposal that cultural institutions and professionals digitise their own collections and license the data to AI companies instead of handing over books to be destroyed, thereby keeping both the digital content and the physical copy. It closes on the data wall, the risk of training on AI-generated text («a summary of a summary of a summary») and the fresh order Font received: the Panama Project may still be running.

Why should we care that books are being destroyed to train AI?

Column by María Gelpí for «Trinchera Cultural», her culture slot at El Confidencial, written from the unusual vantage point of a lifelong customer of Llibreria Fènix: much of her philosophy, theology and law library came from the shop on Carrer del Canonge Baranera in Badalona, and she recalls Marçal Font i Espí —now selling online and teaching literary studies at the University of Barcelona— showing her, day after day, printing errata, authors' dedications, oddities of type and paper, researchers' annotations or the ex libris of vanished libraries. She reconstructs the case: the anomalous orders between 30 April and 8 May 2026 —technical winemaking manuals, 1980s conference proceedings, Civil War diaries, the stuff of public-library weeding— carrying postage no ordinary buyer would pay, and how «Marçal pulled at the thread with his friend Xavi Vinaixa, a dogged researcher and technical director of Sorensen.ai», publishing the result in four instalments on Substack under the title «L'espoli silenciós»: a chain of intermediaries digitising millions of books to order, spines guillotined first, to feed the models of companies such as Anthropic and discard the remains as pulp, with the same pattern in Germany, the United States, New Zealand and Australia. She quotes Vinaixa on the data wall: we had always assumed the ceiling was silicon, when in fact it was data. Her own contribution is the legal and heritage analysis: the June 2025 ruling condemns Anthropic for downloading from pirate libraries yet holds that training on lawfully bought, scanned books is fair use, so that destroying the physical copy —previously mere industrial efficiency— «becomes an imperative and a requirement of good practice», reducing the materiality of the book to a disposable medium. She carries Font's parting line after recording the AI podcast he and Vinaixa have started —what matters is that the metadata and the traceability are lost— and the risk that mass harvesting sweeps away everything outside the catalogue: antiquarian books, orphan works, clandestine editions, fanzines, comics and much of the countercultural publishing that predates legal deposit and the ISBN. She presents Cedulari.cat as Font and Vinaixa's answer —scanning our own heritage here, with provenance and verifiable sources on show, selling the data directly and keeping the linked document— and closes with James Clifford and the Tlingit elders at the Portland Art Museum (1989) and with Foucault on the archive as a monopoly of discourse.

Panama Project: the artificial-intelligence race that is leading to the destruction of old books to feed its models

Unbylined rewrite in the Technology section of Cadena del Mar (FM 106.5, Maldonado, Uruguay), with its own headline and standfirst: a journalistic investigation exposed an operation to buy large quantities of old books and put them through a scanning process that can involve cutting off their spines and destroying the copies. It is the case's second Uruguayan pickup after Montevideo Portal. It explains that the phenomenon came to light when Catalan bookseller Marçal Font, owner of Llibreria Fènix in Badalona, began receiving unusual orders from Canada —striking quantities, placed over very short periods and with shipping costs that made no commercial sense— and that Font consulted «Xavier Vinaixa, a researcher specialising in artificial intelligence», with whom he found booksellers in Germany, New Zealand and other countries reporting the same pattern, until the operations were traced to the «Panama Project». It contrasts non-destructive scanning with destructive scanning —cutting the spine, separating the pages and running them through industrial scanners— and argues that digitising is not preserving: the binding, owners' annotations, stamps, illustrations, paper stock, provenance and marks of use are information the digital copy does not retain, and those copies may end up in private databases beyond the reach of libraries, researchers and readers. A dedicated section covers «the danger of books that never had an ISBN» —fanzines, clandestine publications, political materials, independent magazines, social-movement documents and countercultural output—, followed by the data wall and the risk of training AI on AI-generated text («a summary of a summary of another summary»), closing with the fresh order Font received: the Panama Project may not be over. The case originates in the investigation by Marçal Font i Espí and Xavier Vinaixa Roselló, co-authors of «The Silent Plunder».

Start up fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse

Josep M. Ganyet's second VIA Empresa column carrying the investigation, three months after «Anthropic 451». This time the case is not the opening hook but one link in a wider argument about the data wall: Ganyet takes apart Silicon Valley's unwritten law that «the more data and the more compute, the more intelligence» —citing the $775-800 billion the five big hyperscalers expect to spend on AI infrastructure in 2026, «twice Catalonia's GDP and then some»—, recalls the METR randomised trial (sixteen experienced developers took 19% longer with AI and came away convinced they had been 20% faster), Kaplan's 2020 scaling laws, silicon's quantum limit and Gary Marcus's «Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall». He then traces the escalation of training sources —the open internet, YouTube videos transcribed with Whisper, the Anna's Archive and LibGen pirate libraries (81 TB) downloaded by Meta— up to the «Panama Project», «the code name Anthropic gave the operation», with the memo revealed by the Washington Post, the hiring of Tom Turvey (former head of partnerships at Google Books) and the legal paradox of Judge William Alsup's June 2025 ruling, which makes destroying the copy the most lawful route while costing Anthropic $1.5 billion for seven million pirated books. He quotes the investigation directly: antiquarian bookseller Marçal Font Espí, of Llibreria Fènix in Badalona, received a run of curious orders this spring —last copies of books on Catalan local subjects whose shipping costs far exceeded the price of the goods— and German colleagues had spotted the same thing; «Marçal set to work with AI expert Xavier Vinaixa and, pulling at the thread, they watched suspicion turn into certainty»: the buyer was ZoomBooks, a Canadian intermediary dressed up as a recycling company, and the books travelled to a warehouse outside Chicago and from there to a firm that scanned them by destroying them. He notes that «the affair has reached every international outlet» and adds Musk's tweet promising SpaceXAI would preserve rare books —a textbook piece of bookwashing, since he never says what a rare book is nor promises anything for the rest— and the AirTag 404 Media slipped into a thousand-copy order, tracked to the Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas bearing the logo of the division it lands in, VGT3: a tyrannosaur devouring a book. He closes on the next source, the data of dead companies: the $10 million Google paid for Spirit Airlines' «exquisite corpse» —100 million emails, 500 million Teams messages and 30 million lines of code— and the more than $1 billion The Information reports Anthropic planned to spend on simulation environments.

Behind the enigma of the destruction of millions of rare books, the shadow of artificial intelligence

Investigation by Arthur Cerf in Libération's Digital economy section, also carried in print in the Thursday 3 September 2026 edition (page 8, World section) under the title «La grande broyeuse de livres rares». It is the most extensive original reporting a French newspaper has done on the case: Libération contacts booksellers around the world and reconstructs the chain of orders. It opens with Pieter De Vries, an antiquarian bookseller in Haarlem (Netherlands), who on 15 August receives an email from a company called 2077AI ordering 3,001 volumes and calls the practice cultural barbarism; 2077AI does not answer the paper. It then gathers the Vignes bookshop in Paris (250 books), Becker's Books in Houston (100 books in twenty-four hours), Book Haven in New Zealand (70 in a single order) and Marçal Font, of Llibreria Fènix in Badalona, who received between 200 and 300: not exactly rare books, but works in Spanish and Catalan, pieces of local history, the biography of an unknown soldier from the battalion. Nearly all the orders trace back to one buyer, Zoom Books, bound for a PrepFort warehouse in Wood Dale, Illinois; Reed Pannell (Zoom Books) and Sufyaan Kalota (PrepFort) both invoke client confidentiality. It explains that, to dig further, «Catalan bookseller Marçal Font turned to Xavi Vinaixa, technical director of a Barcelona-based artificial intelligence company», and quotes him at length: the initial scepticism («my starting hypothesis was mundane: a wholesaler consolidating stock»), the reasoning that breaks it —if a buyer is specifically after content with no commercial interest and unavailable online, the value lies not in the book as an object but in the text as data— and the conclusion that someone is building a training corpus out of the physical world. It details the trail of URLs and Zoom Books posts about AI services («AI Training Book Archives») later taken down, and scrupulously records the limit the investigators set themselves: they have never claimed Zoom Books works for any AI company, and have no evidence of a contractual relationship with an AI lab. Vinaixa's second intervention carries the piece's underlying argument: «Buying the book is better than pirating it, I say that clearly. Destroying the book is another matter. And the crucial point is that this destruction is not technically necessary». The frame is completed with the June 2025 Bartz v. Anthropic ruling and the internal memo on «Project Panama» —the initiative to destructively digitise every book in the world—, the hiring of Tom Turvey, the $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers, the 404 Media tracker that ends up in Amazon's VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas, Elon Musk's tweet about SpaceXAI, Michael Burry's «evil incarnate» and the statement from the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers.