Exclusive: FTC urged to investigate AI firms for destroying books
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
The Federal Trade Commission is being urged to investigate AI companies for buying, scanning and destroying books to train AI, per a letter shared first with Axios.
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.
