The Great Forgetting: An AI arms race is consuming thousands of rare books which are sliced, scanned and pulpedBy Jo NovaThe AI hell-for-leather race has taken an ominous turn. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. “We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out” is a legitimate business model in 2026. What if each AI company wants to stop other companies from using the same material? Thankfully, at least Elon Musk says he asked his team to preserve the rare books and “scan them the hard way”.