Burning books to train AI is becoming a global phenomenon. According to Fortune, since the beginning of this year, antiquarian booksellers in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain have陆续 received unusual large-volume orders. Buyers from countries such as Singapore and Canada are ordering thousands of academic books at once, with highly varied titles—unlike typical purchases. For example, Dutch antiquarian bookseller de Vries received an order for 3,000 books from a Singapore-based company called 2077AI. The order included an Excel spreadsheet listing the ISBN of each book. He assumed it was a scam and ignored it. Later, when Dutch journalists investigated the phenomenon of unusual orders received by booksellers across multiple countries, they traced these buyers to connections with AI companies—and realized his earlier “fraudulent email” was actually a legitimate business purchase. The reports show that after purchasing these books, buyers cut off the spines, scan each page into a database, and then destroy the physical copies. The industry refers to this as “destructive scanning”—a faster and cheaper method than preserving the original books. Some buyers pay more in shipping costs than the books themselves, precisely because they value the data. The reason for deliberately destroying the original books is largely to circumvent legal issues: If you buy a book, scan it, and retain both the physical and digital copies, copyright law may consider this as creating an additional copy. But if you destroy the physical copy after scanning, you technically maintain only one version—legally, you can argue you’ve merely reformatted it, not duplicated it. Previously, we wrote about Anthropic being sued for downloading over seven million books from pirate websites to train its model; internally, their justification was “avoiding the legal hassle of buying books.” Now, some companies have learned better: they’re actually purchasing books legally, scanning them, then destroying the physical copies—using physical elimination to bypass copyright restrictions. From piracy to purchasing to burning books—it’s growing increasingly “legal,” yet increasingly surreal.