# AI companies are reportedly shredding millions of books after using them to train AI models — tech giants outsource to middlemen to secretly buy up books for training material

> Having contributed to the growing shortage of memory and storage, AI companies seemingly have a new target in their sights: humanity's literary history.

- **Source:** [Tom's Hardware](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-are-reportedly-shredding-millions-of-books-to-train-models-tech-giants-outsource-to-middlemen-to-secretly-buy-up-books-for-training-material?utm_source=gearopen.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=feed&utm_content=6a689df87f5ab608f2018042)
- **Published:** 2026-07-28
- **Category:** AI & Bots
- **Tags:** #google #gemini #claude #anthropic #ai
- **Canonical:** http://localhost:4321/a/6a689df87f5ab608f2018042

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_GearOpen's distilled summary. The full original article is published at Tom's Hardware (source link above); GearOpen does not republish the source's full text._