An article from PC Gamer reports that artificial intelligence companies are said to be quietly purchasing and destroying large quantities of physical books, using third-party middleman services to distance themselves from the transactions. According to the report, this approach appears designed to avoid the negative publicity that would come from AI firms being directly linked to buying up and disposing of millions of books, a practice tied to the broader controversy over how AI companies source training data for their models.

The webpage supplied for this article consisted almost entirely of site navigation, membership and subscription boilerplate from PC Gamer, with no substantive article text describing specific companies, figures, sources or methods involved. As a result, further detail such as which firms are implicated, how many books have been destroyed, or why physical books are being acquired and destroyed rather than digitised, cannot be confirmed from the material provided.