Japan's Major Book Distributor Sold Millions of Books to Anthropic for AI Training, Stirring Publishing Industry Backlash

Nippon Shuppan Hanbai, Japan's largest book distributor, signed a contract to sell massive quantities of books to Anthropic, a leading U.S. artificial intelligence company, for use in training AI models—a move that has triggered demands for accountability from the publishing industry. According to U.S. court documents unsealed in connection with copyright litigation, Anthropic purchased books from the Japanese distributor and subjected them to destructive scanning: bindings were severed, pages digitized, and the text converted into electronic data for model training. Internal Anthropic memos from November 2024 identified Nippon Shuppan Hanbai as a "high-confidence acquisition partner," with discount negotiations already complete at that time.