AI Firms Accused of Buying and Destroying Books After Scanning

More than a dozen consumer advocacy and public interest organizations have called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether leading AI developers are engaging in anticompetitive practices by purchasing books, scanning them for training data, and then destroying the physical copies.

In a letter sent Friday to FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Mark Meador, groups including the Demand Progress Education Fund, Consumer Federation of America, and Institute for Local Self-Reliance described what they term "hoard-and-destroy" tactics. According to the organizations, some destroyed books represent the last surviving copies of original works.

The practice and its scope

The advocacy groups cite a 2024 copyright lawsuit filed by writer Andrea Bartz and others against AI developer Anthropic. The plaintiffs accused the company of acquiring, scanning, and discarding millions of print books. A judge ruled in 2025 that Anthropic's use of legally purchased books to train its Claude AI model did not violate copyright law.

Separately, digital publisher 404 Media reported this week that Amazon has been buying books in bulk, scanning them to train AI tools, and subsequently destroying them. Neither Anthropic nor Amazon immediately responded to requests for comment, according to CBS News, which first reported the advocacy groups' FTC complaint.

Legal and competitive concerns

The organizations argue that mass book destruction could violate Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in commerce. Their concern centers on market access: by eliminating physical copies of books after digitization, well-funded AI companies may be creating barriers that prevent competitors and the public from accessing the same source material.

"Through their practice of permanently destroying books en masse and thus removing those nonrenewable resources from broader access, AI companies are engineering a future where only the wealthiest incumbents can build high-quality AI models," the letter states.

The groups are asking the FTC to determine how widespread the practice is and how many of the destroyed books are the last remaining copies of their underlying works.

Why it matters

This complaint highlights a tension in AI development that goes beyond copyright law. Even when companies legally purchase books, the subsequent destruction of physical copies raises questions about market concentration and long-term access to cultural materials. If the practice is widespread, it could give early-moving AI companies with deep resources a permanent advantage in model quality while simultaneously reducing the pool of training materials available to future competitors, researchers, and the public. The FTC's response could set precedent for how regulators view the acquisition and disposal of analog information resources in the AI era.

Details of the advocacy groups' complaint and the related investigations were first reported by CBS News.