This past March, Jessica DuPont, who has run Half Moon Used Books in Troy, New York for the last 17 years, began to receive odd book orders from mysterious companies on an online platform. Previously, she'd got one to two orders a month from the secondhand book marketplace Alibris. Suddenly, companies with names like "Green Parrot Project," "Blue Finch Project" and "Scan PB" were ordering as many as 60 per day through the platform.
"They were buying obscure academic texts, like 'Commentaries on Theophrastus,' or 'Plato's Views on Education, Collected Essays,'" she said. "They were not buying super-special first editions." (The exception was one signed book of poems by Larry Levis.)
DuPont said the buyers, in an apparent attempt to hide the final destination, used fake individualized orders, which was "exceptionally wasteful" in terms of packaging. Meanwhile, they didn't seem to care about price—so she jacked them up 10 percent. The orders kept coming.
When DuPont emailed Alibris to ask what was going on, she said they replied that the orders were the result of a new client. When she pressed for more information, the company admitted it didn't know the ultimate destination of the books, DuPont said.
After talking with fellow booksellers, DuPont found out about the AI behemoth Anthropic's project to buy all the world's books, slice off their spines with a hydraulic machine, and scan them into a central digital library that will be used to train its large language models, like Claude. She realized other booksellers around the world were also reporting massive spikes in orders on platforms such as Alibris, Biblio and ISBNdb.
When DuPont found out about Anthropic's project, it led her to suspect that her books were also being fed into an AI learning model and destroyed. But after two months, the orders had dried up. DuPont said she'd made about $38,000 from the sales in two months, after Alibris took a 20 percent commission. Alibris did not respond to a request for comment.
"Quite honestly, I had a very rough 2025, so this personally for me was a windfall that allowed me to keep my two assistants and helped me stay in business," DuPont explained. "Do I go to my staff and say, 'Hey, there's this lifeline where you can keep your job, but I'm against it ethically. Do you mind losing your job for a bunch of fucking books that nobody wants, that I haven't been able to sell?' So, if I had it to do again, I might do the same thing. And I feel like shit admitting that, but at the same time, we live in this capitalist system, and I need to survive."