Dutch Bookseller Gets 3,001-Book China Order Linked to AI Training

3 articles · Updated · Fortune · Jul 31

Pieter de Vries said a woman claiming to represent “2077AI” emailed him a spreadsheet of 3,001 ISBNs and asked for quotes and shipping costs to China, a request he initially dismissed as spam.
The list was dominated by 2020-2021 academic titles from publishers including Elsevier, Wiley and Oxford, suggesting a bulk procurement effort far outside de Vries’ usual rare-book trade.
De Vries said several other Dutch antiquarian booksellers received the same inquiry and also treated it as a scam, indicating the request was part of a wider sourcing push rather than a one-off order.
The email surfaced as AI firms hunt for high-quality text beyond the open web; court records last year showed Anthropic bought millions of physical books, scanned them and discarded the originals for model training.
Similar unusual orders have been reported in Germany and Switzerland, offering a rare look at the physical book supply chain that may feed large language models; 2077AI did not respond to Fortune.