Civil-society groups urge FTC to probe AI firms over destroyed books

More than a dozen civil-society groups have asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether AI companies broke competition law by buying, scanning and physically destroying books to build training data.

In a letter sent Aug. 21, the coalition — which includes the Demand Progress Education Fund, the Consumer Federation of America and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance — named Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. It argues that destroying purchased books to digitize them could be an unfair method of competition, raising rivals’ costs and denying smaller startups access to the same source material.

The complaint escalates a controversy that surfaced earlier in August, when reporting described how AI developers were acquiring physical books at scale to feed their models. Anthropic was said to have spent millions buying books and cutting off their spines to scan the pages for training its Claude models, and Amazon to have bought and destroyed rare books for training data.

The move reframes a copyright-tinged fight as an antitrust one. Rather than argue over whether scanning books infringes authors’ rights, the groups are asking the FTC to treat the buy-and-destroy pipeline as anticompetitive conduct that locks up scarce training material behind the biggest players’ budgets.

The letter is a request, not an investigation, and the account rests on a single report. The FTC has not said whether it will act. Whether the agency opens a probe will test how far it is willing to police the raw inputs of the AI industry, not just its outputs.