Japan ships books by the ton to the U.S.; purchases may supply AI systems
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More than 50 tons of Japanese books have been sent to the United States since last year, Japan’s NTV reports. Buyers are seeking works on philosophy, history, medicine, law, politics and Japanese culture; the broadcaster suspects some of the material is being digitized to train AI systems and then discarded. Used-book stores have recorded orders far above normal levels, and hundreds of orders used different accounts with the same address at a logistics center in Okayama; the company operating it did not identify the buyers.
The practice drew attention in the Anthropic case. The company created an operation to buy, digitize and destroy millions of books to develop Claude and was ordered to pay US$1.5 billion in copyright damages. 404 Media also traced a rare book to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas that, according to the site, digitized and destroyed books on a large scale. Amazon confirmed that it buys books to develop and improve its products and services, without detailing how the material is used.
Why it matters · editorial interpretation
The buying, digitization and disposal chain described in the case makes it difficult to identify who uses the works and for what purpose, while the ruling against Anthropic signals significant financial risk when the process involves copyright. The buyers’ unidentified status and Amazon’s lack of detail about how material is used also limit transparency for authors and publishers.