But AI companies are interested in neither. Often, they’re happy to use digital books — or even better, pirated digital books, as Meta has been accused of doing, and as Anthropic was forced to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to authors for also doing. But many companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap. “Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools.” Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000 to one million books per order, according to 404.