US: FTC urged to probe AI firms destroying books

Washington, Aug 21 (IANS) More than a dozen civil-society organisations have asked the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate whether dominant artificial-intelligence companies are harming competition by purchasing, scanning and physically destroying books used to train their models.

The coalition argues that the practice could remove important source material from the open market, raise costs for emerging competitors and leave large AI companies with the only surviving digital copies of some works.

Demand Progress Education Fund, the Consumer Federation of America and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance are among the organisations behind the request.

The groups want the FTC to determine whether acquiring and destroying books constitutes an unfair method of competition under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. Axios first reported the letter.

They described the practice as a “destructive new data acquisition practice by dominant AI companies.”

The coalition is not asking the commission to restrict AI training itself. Instead, its complaint focuses on the potential competitive consequences of purchasing physical books, converting them into private datasets and destroying the original copies.

“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 letter said.

The organisations argued that large technology companies could use their financial resources to acquire books in bulk, preventing smaller AI developers from accessing the same material.

They also raised concerns about less common, out-of-print and specialised books that may be difficult or impossible to replace once destroyed.

“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 wrote.

The FTC did not immediately announce whether it would open an investigation.

The coalition’s appeal follows disclosures that Anthropic acquired and destructively scanned millions of physical books as part of an internal effort known as Project Panama.

Court records reported earlier this year showed that book spines were removed so pages could be scanned rapidly, after which the physical material was sent for recycling.

The company’s stated objective was to obtain high-quality written material for training the AI models behind Claude.

The coalition’s complaint introduces a competition-policy dimension to a debate that has largely focused on copyright, licensing and whether technology companies should compensate authors and publishers for using their work.

An antitrust investigation would examine whether book acquisition and destruction exclude competitors rather than simply whether the training process infringes copyright.

–IANS

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