Ashley Gold, Axios ; Exclusive: FTC urged to investigate AI firms for destroying books
"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."
