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Oxford has let OpenAI use old texts from its Bodleian Library to train its AI models, according to internal papers seen by the Guardian. Ethan Penny and Dan Milmo broke the story on Saturday.
The papers say texts that OpenAI scanned at the library went into the firm’s training data.
Oxford made its deal with OpenAI public in March 2025. At the time, it said OpenAI’s tools would help scan rare texts so more students and scholars could read them. It did not say the texts would be used to train AI.
By June 2025, the Bodleian had sent OpenAI 125,000 scans of old PhD theses, the Guardian reported. They include theses written at European and US universities in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Notes from staff meetings, which the Guardian got through a freedom of information request, show some staff had doubts. They worried about harm to Oxford’s name and about the energy use of AI.
However, Oxford said the scans were small in scale, out of copyright and not exclusive to OpenAI. The library keeps the rights and will start to post the scans online in the next few months, a spokesperson said.
The spokesperson also said the AI training side had not been hidden. Scanning was Oxford’s main goal, but staff had been open that the texts would also be used to train models.
“With more than a billion people using this technology in everyday life, it’s important it reflects different cultures, histories and perspectives,” an OpenAI spokesperson told the Guardian.
Oxford is the only UK member of OpenAI’s NextGenAI group. Other members include Boston Public Library, Caltech, MIT and the University of Michigan.
The deal comes as AI firms buy printed books for slop-free training data, since the web is now full of AI-made text. Some buyers cut books apart to scan them, which has upset secondhand booksellers.
In August, 404 Media tracked a box of rare books to an Amazon site that scans and destroys books for AI. The Bodleian’s books stay whole under its deal, the Guardian reported.
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