AI Weekly Malaysia

Independent bookstores across Europe are reportedly receiving suspicious bulk orders for thousands of books, with sellers suspecting the books are being acquired to be destroyed and used as AI training data. The orders are believed to be part of AI tech companies' broader push to acquire more training data as publicly available web sources become exhausted or legally contested.

Why: Signals that the era of scraping freely available web text for AI training is closing, and companies are turning to physical media acquisition as a data sourcing strategy. Founders building AI products should expect training data costs and legal scrutiny to rise, and should not assume their models can be trained on publicly available text indefinitely.

British Transport Police is expanding its live facial recognition trial to the London Underground, starting at Victoria station and rotating through stations until November 2026. The system uses NEC's NeoFace M40 algorithm to scan faces against a watchlist, generating alerts that officers must review before acting. Privacy campaigners like Big Brother Watch call the expansion dystopian, noting errors have already led to innocent people being detained and that ethnic minorities face higher misidentification risk.

Why: For builders working on computer vision or AI deployment, this is a concrete case study of facial recognition rolling into routine public infrastructure at scale (3.7M daily Tube journeys), with documented misidentification and bias issues. If you ship biometric or surveillance-adjacent tech, the operational and reputational risks shown here—false positives, demographic bias, civil liberties backlash—are the ones you need to design around, not abstract ethics frameworks.