AI companies are burning books, advocates complain to FTC

AI companies are buying loads of physical books, hoovering up the texts for model training, and then physically destroying the originals. A group of 18 advocacy organizations on Friday asked the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate the book butchering and knowledge hoarding. Fresh details of the practice emerged earlier this year via document disclosures in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, a copyright case brought by authors of books that the AI company used for training without permission. Anthropic's book scan-and-destroy operation was known as "Project Panama." It was described in a 2024 internal memo as "our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world." Anthropic gave the operation a codename "because we don't want it to be known that we are working on this," the court exhibit explains. "This document is visible to all Anthropic employees, but you should avoid talking about it in public areas, and the fact that we are working on this should not be shared with anyone outside Anthropic." Older books turn out to be valuable for AI training because they're unpolluted by AI-generated text, which has been seeping into recent written work. And destroying books once they've been scanned avoids the cost of storage. In some circumstances, scan-and-destroy operations may support fair use claims. In the Bartz case, the district court accepted the argument that a physical book can be digitized and destroyed, substituting the electronic copy for the physical book in a transformative act of fair use. But that didn't work out for the Internet Archive. Anthropic, which did not respond to a request for comment, is not the only company consuming and trashing texts. A recent report found Amazon has been participating in book scanning and shredding. Amazon also did not respond to a request for comment. The subject has become a public relations headache, in part because of the barbarism of book destruction and its association with authoritarian regimes, and in part because of the broad backlash against AI companies for pillaging public resources in pursuit of private gain. Intermediaries appear to be feeling the heat. ISBNdb, which reportedly helped broker the acquisition of books for destructive scanning, recently disavowed the practice. The biz noted last month, "We've removed a recent landing page, 'Printed Books Sourcing for Your AI LLMs Dataset Needs.' It was part of exploring demand, and we've chosen to pivot away from that direction." In light of these revelations, civil society groups want the FTC to look into book buy-and-destroy operations on the basis that they prevent competing AI developers and the public from accessing those resources. "The secretive and reckless way that major AI companies like Anthropic and Amazon are acting shows that there is real smoke here that the FTC needs to investigate," Kate Oh, special advisor to the Demand Progress Education Fund, said in a statement provided to The Register. The groups' letter [PDF] casts scan-and-destroy operations primarily as anticompetitive - the FTC being notionally a competition watchdog - but it hints at the anti-democratic consequences of monopolized knowledge. "Through their practice of permanently destroying books en masse and thus removing those non-renewable resources from broader access, AI companies are engineering a future where only the wealthiest incumbents can build high-quality AI models and operate as the sole holders of humanity's written works - after having destroyed the originals to get there," the letter says. We're unaware of whether any texts have been shifted entirely into AI models without leaving any physical copies. But then how would anyone verify that when AI companies refuse to divulge their training data? The letter asks the FTC to answer that question: "What the public record does not establish - and cannot, from the outside - is how often the destroyed physical books are the last or among the last surviving copies of a given work." (R)