Exclusive: FTC urged to investigate AI firms for destroying books; Axios, August 21, 2026

 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."

Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?; BBC, August 15, 2026

Philippa Wain , BBC; Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?

"Destructive scanning

The court documents relating to the Anthropic case revealed the project of ingesting old books was referred to in internal company communications as "Project Panama."

The documents indicated the company's aim was to "destructively scan all the books in the world".

Destructive scanning is the process of shipping books to locations where they can be digitised at an industrial scale. 

It includes removing a book's spine so all the pages can be scanned rapidly - and the remains recycled.

"A lot of mystery surrounds Project Panama," Manley, from Barter Books, says."

Hidden Airtag reveals Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI; Ars Technica, August 17, 2026

ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica; Hidden Airtag reveals Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI

"For the past year or so, booksellers have suspected that AI firms are buying up huge lots of rare books, then destroying them after scanning them to train AI. But this was hard to prove until now, as 404 Media reports that an Airtag hidden in a rare book shows that at least one tech giant, in the race to advance its frontier models, is behind some of the bulk orders: Amazon.

On Monday, 404 Media revealed that it had connected with a bookseller who agreed to plant an Airtag in a rare book that was part of a bulk order. That Airtag was then tracked to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning pages, 404 Media reported. Apparently tone-deaf to the escalating backlash over destructive book scanning, a logo on the door of that team’s warehouse, VGT3, showed a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book, 404 Media documented."

Upstate public library one of few to house rare book collection; Spectrum News 1, July 7, 2026

 VIKTORIA HALLIKAAR , Spectrum News 1; Upstate public library one of few to house rare book collection

"The resources you can find at public libraries seem to be ever-growing. One collection is keeping an eye on the future by preserving the past.

Deep in the stacks of the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library is a massive collection of books.

“We're contemporary. We're of the moment,” explained Heather Gring, the rare book curator for Buffalo & Erie County Public Library.

But these books aren’t your standard page-turners.

“The oldest thing in our collection is 4,000 years old, and the most contemporary is local press that has been made this year,” said Gring.

Spectrum News 1 was given a rare look inside the rare book vaults.

“The difference between an old book and a rare book is who wants to buy it,” Gring explained.

Cameras, locks and key codes are trying to not repeat the mistakes of the past.

“This collection is worth, collectively, millions of dollars,” said Gring. "The way the Rare Books department was even started was because of a theft in the 1930s. [...] They worked with the FBI, and they did successfully retrieve almost all of the books that had been stolen.”

Keeping these treasures safe doesn’t mean keeping them hidden. This is one of only about 25 rare book departments in the country to be housed in a public library."

Lost copy of seventh-century poem in Old English discovered at Rome library; The Guardian, April 29, 2026

 Rory Carroll , The Guardian; Lost copy of seventh-century poem in Old English discovered at Rome library

"“This discovery is a testament to the power of libraries to facilitate new research by digitising their collections and making them freely available online,” she said.

Andrea Cappa, head of manuscripts and rare books at the Rome library, said the institution was digitising holdings from Italy’s National Centre for the Study of the Manuscript, which will give researchers access to more than 40m images.

Riccardo Fangarezzi, head of archives at the abbey in Nonantola, said he looked forward to further discoveries. “The present times may be rather dark, yet such intellectual contributions are genuine rays of sunlight: the continent is less isolated,” he said.

The poet Paul Muldoon translated Caedmon’s Hymn into contemporary English in a 2016 anthology of British poetry. The opening lines read:

“Now we must praise to the skies, the Keeper of the heavenly kingdom,

The might of the Measurer, all he has in mind,

The work of the Father of Glory, of all manner of marvel.”"