An AI Company Is Buying Used Books on Amazon. Anthropic's Project Panama Started the Pattern.

Written By Shaan Jain
Anthropic Project Panama: AI Bulk Buying on Amazon — Astra Blog
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A second-hand bookshop in Wellington, New Zealand got 71 books ordered in a single transaction earlier this year. Then more orders from the same buyer, sometimes minutes apart, all for obscure non-fiction titles 30 to 40 years out of print. The shipping address was a warehouse in Illinois. The buyer was an account called Zoom Books that nobody had heard of. The marketplace it came through was AbeBooks, which Amazon has owned since 2008.

Breaking AI bulk-buying on Amazon is reshaping marketplace demand signals in real time.

The same buyer is now hitting independent sellers on Amazon directly. Amazon seller forum threads about Zoom Books have been active since February, with sellers reporting cluster orders of strange, narrow non-fiction titles, all shipping to the same Illinois warehouse, and asking each other whether the orders are even legitimate. The leading theory among the booksellers caught up in it is that the books aren't being resold or read. They're being scanned, destroyed, and used to train AI. It's the same playbook Anthropic ran under Project Panama. If the theory is right, and the circumstantial case is strong, Amazon now has a buyer category that doesn't behave anything like a retail consumer. That's worth paying attention to even if you don't sell books.

Project Panama and the Bartz v. Anthropic Ruling

In late January 2026, the Washington Post reported on an internal Anthropic project called Project Panama. Court documents unsealed in Bartz v. Anthropic, the copyright lawsuit Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion in August 2025, described the project as "our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world." Anthropic spent tens of millions of dollars buying physical books in batches of tens of thousands from retailers including Better World Books and the UK-based World of Books, slicing off their spines, scanning the pages on industrial scanners, and sending the remains to recycling. The vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books over six months.

The legal piece is the part that matters most for what happens next. Judge William Alsup's ruling in Bartz v. Anthropic, handed down in June 2025, found that training AI models on lawfully purchased physical books was transformative fair use. Training on pirated digital copies was not, which is what triggered the $1.5 billion settlement. The result is a clean legal blueprint: buy physical books, scan them, and the training is legal. The exposure sits in the acquisition method, not the scanning. Every AI lab with active copyright litigation is now reading the same blueprint, and Amazon's marketplace, combined with Amazon-owned AbeBooks, hosts the largest searchable pool of physical books anywhere.

$1.5B Anthropic settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic
2M Books targeted in Project Panama vendor proposal
8.55% Cancellation rate spike for one seller after refusing a single bulk order

What Amazon Sellers Are Seeing with Zoom Books

Within weeks of the Project Panama documents being unsealed, independent sellers on Amazon, AbeBooks, and Alibris started reporting an unusual surge of bulk orders from Zoom Books, a company based in Lynden, Washington with a wholesale operation in Canada and a warehouse address in Illinois on outbound shipments. The Bookhaven Wellington post that surfaced this publicly described tens of thousands of books being ordered every day across AbeBooks alone if you extrapolated from the volume individual sellers were reporting. The titles that drew attention were the ones nobody buys: obscure, out-of-print, narrow non-fiction, often 30 to 40 years old, often on regional subjects. One was "General Orders Issued by Major-General Israel Putnam, When in Command of the Highlands, in the Summer and Fall of 1777."

Zoom Books has not been named in any court filing as an AI training supplier. Anthropic's named suppliers in the unsealed documents were Better World Books and World of Books UK. But Zoom Books' own marketing site has, since March 2026, openly positioned the company as a wholesale supplier for AI training programs, citing Project Panama by name and noting that the original Anthropic suppliers "won't be the only companies serving this demand going forward." The buying patterns and the company's own positioning point in the same direction even if the formal confirmation hasn't landed.

There is a less dramatic alternative theory worth naming. Zoom Books could be a well-funded clearinghouse trying to corner the supply of niche titles so they become the default seller when those titles get searched. That theory is plausible, and it ends in the same place. A buyer is moving large volumes of obscure inventory off Amazon's marketplace for a reason that has nothing to do with someone wanting to read the book.

How AI Bulk Buying Breaks Amazon Best Seller Rank

The reason this matters outside used books is that Amazon's marketplace runs on demand signals. Best Seller Rank, sales velocity, conversion rate, and a dozen other metrics drive how Amazon's ranking algorithm decides what to surface. Most of those signals assume the buyer is a consumer who wants the product. Once a non-consumer buyer starts moving meaningful volume through Amazon, the signals get noisier. A book that has sat outside the top million BSR for years can move several hundred thousand places overnight when a bulk buyer takes the last copies on the market. Anyone using BSR-based sourcing tools, anyone using historical sales velocity to forecast, anyone using competitor sales data to pick a category, is now working with a signal that has more noise in it than it did six months ago.

The other concrete Amazon-side harm is to seller account health. Amazon's Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation Rate threshold is 2.5%, and exceeding it puts sellers at risk of account deactivation. One bookseller who cancelled a single bulk order from Zoom Books, because they didn't have the inventory to ship, saw their cancellation rate jump from 0% to 8.55% in one move. The seller who didn't want to participate in an AI scanning operation, or who simply couldn't fulfill the volume, faced an Amazon account suspension threat for cancelling. That trap exists for any Amazon seller who suddenly gets ordered in volumes they weren't built to handle by a buyer whose intent they can't predict.

Why AI Training Demand Won't Stay in Books

Books are the first visible case because AI training values text more than almost any other data type, and physical books are the highest-quality dense text source that exists. The legal logic that made Project Panama work doesn't care about the format. It applies to anything copyrighted that an AI lab wants to ingest where the digital version isn't licensable. Technical manuals, repair guides, instructional materials, magazines, academic journals, and professional references all sit in the same legal posture, and Amazon's marketplace already hosts massive used inventory across every one of those categories.

There is also a separate dynamic worth naming. Amazon has spent the last two years quietly building its own position in the AI economy, building its own power grid to feed AI data centers, and going to federal court to block AI shopping agents from transacting on Amazon's behalf. The shopping agents case is especially worth rereading in light of Zoom Books, because Amazon argued it needed to protect advertisers who pay only for "legitimate human impressions." Amazon's official legal stance is that human buyers are the customer. Its actual marketplace is increasingly hosting transactions that aren't.

What Changes for Amazon Sellers

Most Amazon sellers will never see Zoom Books in their order history. Most don't list the kind of obscure niche inventory that AI training programs are trying to corner. That's the easy part. The harder part is that the data layer Amazon runs on, BSR, demand velocity, category ranking, sales history, is now being shaped by buyers whose reasons don't map to any consumer behavior model. A spike that used to mean "this product is taking off" can now also mean "an AI lab decided this title was useful." Telling the difference is going to become a real skill.

The booksellers who refused Zoom Books' orders are the only ones in this story behaving the way Amazon's marketplace was originally designed for. Everyone else, Amazon, the AI labs, the wholesalers positioning themselves as the next supplier, is treating the marketplace as raw material for something else.

If your category is used or collectible goods, technical manuals, reference materials, or any high-text-density niche inventory, keep an eye on unusual bulk order patterns. A cancellation rate jump can happen in a single order. Document any anomalous transactions before acting on them.

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Shaan Jain
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