AI Companies Face FTC Investigation Over Mass Book Destruction for Model Training

AI companies are burning books, advocates complain to FTC

AI companies are buying loads of physical books, hoovering up the texts for model training, and then physically destroying the originals. A group of 18 advocacy organizations on Friday asked the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate the book butchering and knowledge hoarding. Fresh details of the practice emerged earlier this year via document disclosures in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, a copyright case brought by authors of books that the AI company used for training without permission. Anthropic's book scan-and-destroy operation was known as "Project Panama." It was described in a 2024 internal memo as "our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world." Anthropic gave the operation a codename "because we don't want it to be known that we are working on this," the court exhibit explains. "This document is visible to all Anthropic employees, but you should avoid talking about it in public areas, and the fact that we are working on this should not be shared with anyone outside Anthropic." Older books turn out to be valuable for AI training because they're unpolluted by AI-generated text, which has been seeping into recent written work. And destroying books once they've been scanned avoids the cost of storage. In some circumstances, scan-and-destroy operations may support fair use claims. In the Bartz case, the district court accepted the argument that a physical book can be digitized and destroyed, substituting the electronic copy for the physical book in a transformative act of fair use. But that didn't work out for the Internet Archive. Anthropic, which did not respond to a request for comment, is not the only company consuming and trashing texts. A recent report found Amazon has been participating in book scanning and shredding. Amazon also did not respond to a request for comment. The subject has become a public relations headache, in part because of the barbarism of book destruction and its association with authoritarian regimes, and in part because of the broad backlash against AI companies for pillaging public resources in pursuit of private gain. Intermediaries appear to be feeling the heat. ISBNdb, which reportedly helped broker the acquisition of books for destructive scanning, recently disavowed the practice. The biz noted last month, "We've removed a recent landing page, 'Printed Books Sourcing for Your AI LLMs Dataset Needs.' It was part of exploring demand, and we've chosen to pivot away from that direction." In light of these revelations, civil society groups want the FTC to look into book buy-and-destroy operations on the basis that they prevent competing AI developers and the public from accessing those resources. "The secretive and reckless way that major AI companies like Anthropic and Amazon are acting shows that there is real smoke here that the FTC needs to investigate," Kate Oh, special advisor to the Demand Progress Education Fund, said in a statement provided to The Register. The groups' letter [PDF] casts scan-and-destroy operations primarily as anticompetitive - the FTC being notionally a competition watchdog - but it hints at the anti-democratic consequences of monopolized knowledge. "Through their practice of permanently destroying books en masse and thus removing those non-renewable resources from broader access, AI companies are engineering a future where only the wealthiest incumbents can build high-quality AI models and operate as the sole holders of humanity's written works - after having destroyed the originals to get there," the letter says. We're unaware of whether any texts have been shifted entirely into AI models without leaving any physical copies. But then how would anyone verify that when AI companies refuse to divulge their training data? The letter asks the FTC to answer that question: "What the public record does not establish - and cannot, from the outside - is how often the destroyed physical books are the last or among the last surviving copies of a given work." ®

Civil society groups push FTC to sue AI companies over book destruction

Earlier this month, we reported on the disturbing trend of AI companies using and then destroying physical copies of books to train their agentic AI, in a practice so eerily reminiscent of book burning that it's spooking even devotees of artificial intelligence. Well, according to Axios, the FTC is now being urged to investigate the practice, not, as we might like, for crimes against humanity, but for violations of antitrust law, since every book destroyed is one less book available for competing AI agents to use. Axios reports that "[m]ore than a dozen civil society groups," including Demand Progress Education Fund, the Consumer Federation of America, and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, are urging the FTC to investigate these practices, particularly those involving rare books. In their letter, they "urge the FTC to view this practice not in isolation but rather as the latest escalation in a documented pattern of anticompetitive conduct designed to create an insurmountable systemic moat around AI incumbents." The problem is all the more acute because these companies are allegedly targeting older books -- especially those published before 2022 -- since those books are guaranteed not to have been written by AI and are far more likely to have been well edited. The letter continues: "Unlike a standard data acquisition strategy, this hoard-and-destroy practice could serve as yet another structural mechanism to raise rival companies' costs and deny start-ups and fledgling competitors a key source material essential to competing in the AI marketplace." Recall OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's description of knowledge as a utility that could be sold to you "like electricity and water"? That business proposition looks a lot less wholesome when it involves the wholesale destruction of books, our first and still-unsurpassed repository for human knowledge, most of which can still be acquired cheaply or freely loaned from a local library. Sadder still is the fact that our best practical defense against this modern book burning isn't an ethical one but a legal one: that it would be bad for other businesses.

Exclusive: FTC urged to investigate AI firms for destroying books

Why it matters: If the FTC agrees, the fight over AI training data may move from copyright into competition. * That could include regulators scrutinizing whether dominant AI firms are literally eliminating resources their rivals need to compete. Driving the news: More than a dozen civil society groups are urging the FTC to use its authority to examine what the letter's authors call a "destructive new data acquisition practice by dominant AI companies." * The groups include Demand Progress Education Fund, the Consumer Federation of America and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. * In January, the Washington Post, citing court filings, reported that Anthropic spent millions to acquire and physically remove the spines of books to feed their scanned pages into Claude. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have faced similar copyright lawsuits, per the Post. Specifically, the groups want the FTC to determine whether such conduct constitutes an unfair method of competition, arguing that any AI company that does so is "starving the market" of critical source materials. * The letter points out that in some cases, rare books could be destroyed forever, with digital firms snagging the last copies. What they're saying: "We urge the FTC to view this practice not in isolation but rather as the latest escalation in a documented pattern of anticompetitive conduct designed to create an insurmountable systemic moat around AI incumbents," the groups write. * "Unlike a standard data acquisition strategy, this hoard-and-destroy practice could serve as yet another structural mechanism to raise rival companies' costs and deny start-ups and fledgling competitors a key source material essential to competing in the AI marketplace." * The groups don't want the FTC to restrict AI model training; rather, they're focused on the practice of destroying existing works and urging the FTC to potentially intervene before AI companies build dominance on the practice. What we're watching: The FTC under the Trump administration has carefully toed the line of being friendly to American business while signaling concern about competition and Big Tech dominance.

AI companies accused of hoarding and destroying millions of books

Megan Cerullo is a New York-based reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering small business, workplace, health care, consumer spending and personal finance topics. She regularly appears on CBS News 24/7 to discuss her reporting. More than a dozen public interest and consumer advocacy groups are urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate leading artificial intelligence developers for allegedly buying, scanning and destroying books used to train their large language models, a practice the organizations described as "destructive" and anticompetitive. In a letter to FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Mark Meador on Friday, the Demand Progress Education Fund, Consumer Federation of America and Institute for Local Self-Reliance, among other groups, said the AI companies are buying books in bulk, digitizing the content to train their AI apps and then destroying the physical copies. In some cases, the destroyed books are among the last surviving copies of original works, according to the letter. Such "hoard-and-destroy" practices, as critics call them, could make it harder for the public and for other AI companies to access essential source material, the groups argue. Destroying books could also constitute an unfair method of competition under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which bars unfair or deceptive acts or practices in commerce, they allege. "Through their practice of permanently destroying books en masse and thus removing those nonrenewable resources from broader access, AI companies are engineering a future where only the wealthiest incumbents can build high-quality AI models and operate as the sole holders of humanity's written works -- after having destroyed the originals to get there," the letter states. The groups are asking the FTC to determine the scale of the practice and how many of the destroyed books are the last remaining copies of the underlying works. The groups cite an August 2024 copyright lawsuit brought by writer Andrea Bartz and others against AI developer Anthropic, which they accused of acquiring, scanning and discarding millions of print books. In 2025, a judge ruled that Anthropic's use of legally purchased books to train its AI model, Claude, did not violate copyright law. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A separate investigation by digital publisher 404 Media this week reported that Amazon is buying books in bulk, scanning them to train its AI tools and then destroying them. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.