The US Federal Trade Commission is urged to investigate AI companies' act of destroying books
Comparatively, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is being urged to investigate the acts of some AI companies obtaining AI training data by buying, scanning, and destroying books. According to an open letter obtained by Axios, more than a dozen civil society organizations are calling on the FTC to use regulatory powers to examine what large AI companies call disruptive new methods of data acquisition. Earlier, the “Washington Post” quoted court documents as reporting that Anthropic had spent millions of dollars to buy books and remove book spines to scan the pages and use them to train Claude; Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have also faced similar copyright lawsuits. These organizations want the FTC to further determine whether such actions constitute unfair competition practices. They believe that by acquiring and destroying physical books, AI companies may actually be emptying the market's key data resources. In particular, some rare books may disappear permanently as a result, while digital companies hold the last few physical copies. Relevant organizations warn that this practice of hoarding and destroying may increase competitors' data acquisition costs, while cutting off important raw materials that AI startups rely on to train models, thereby further expanding competitive barriers for leading AI companies. However, rather than requiring the FTC to restrict AI model training, they want regulators to focus on reviewing the destruction of existing works and intervene before large AI companies use this to establish a market advantage. According to the open letter, this approach is not simply a data acquisition strategy, but may become another structural means for leading AI companies to build a systemic moat that is difficult to overcome. Currently, the FTC under the Trump administration wants to maintain a relatively friendly regulatory environment for US companies, and on the other hand, it continues to release attention to market competition and the monopoly risk of large technology companies.