B-SIDE-ART

  In July 2026, Dutch antiquarian bookseller Pieter de Vries opened an email requesting 3,001 specific titles, mostly academic-press editions from 2020 and 2021, from publishers like Elsevier, Wiley, and Routledge. He assumed it was spam and deleted it. Booksellers in Germany and Switzerland soon reported nearly identical bulk orders, all traced to a little-known outfit called 2077AI. Nobody explained why anyone would want thousands of unremarkable scholarly volumes, and de Vries only later arrived at the likely answer: somewhere downstream, the books would be scanned, stripped of their bindings, and thrown away. That scan-then-discard pattern is exactly what a Hyperallergic newsletter invoked on August 4, 2026, under the headline "AI Is the New Book Burning." Its target was Anthropic, accused of buying out-of-print books, digitizing them, and destroying the originals to train its Claude models — an act the newsletter called "artistic plunder aimed at gutting our humanit...

  In April, at a Barcelona auction house preparing a routine sale, officers from Spain's National Police and Catalonia's Mossos d'Esquadra approached a modest wooden relief on display among the lots. Carved from wood, gilded, and painted in the polychrome technique typical of Spanish Renaissance workshops, the panel measured barely 81 by 45 centimeters — small enough to have moved through a flea market stall and at least one antiques dealer without anyone asking where it had come from. The relief depicts Saint Bonaventure, the 13th-century Franciscan theologian, and once occupied a niche in the altarpiece dedicated to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception on the main altar of the Monastery of Santa Clara in Fitero, a Poor Clares convent in southern Navarre. It had been missing since around 2010, one of an unrecorded number of works lifted from religious buildings across the region in years when parish inventories were thin and security thinner. Investigators matched it to...