Secondhand booksellers in the United Kingdom and Ireland have reported a surge in bulk orders from unidentified purchasers, many of whom are located abroad. The orders, which include requests for large quantities of titles from the United States, Canada, continental Europe and the United Kingdom, have been noted by bookshops contacted by the Guardian. Similar patterns have been observed by booksellers in the United States, Australia and other European countries.

Anthropic has been reported to have spent millions of dollars acquiring books for data scanning purposes.

Speculation that the purchases are intended for training artificial intelligence models has been expressed by observers, though the buyers have not publicly confirmed their motives.