A coalition of public interest and consumer advocacy groups has petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into the practices of top artificial intelligence developers. The organizations, which include the Consumer Federation of America and the Demand Progress Education Fund, claim that these companies are buying, scanning, and permanently destroying millions of physical books to train their large language models.
According to the formal letter addressed to FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Mark Meador, this practice of purchasing books in bulk for digitization and subsequent destruction creates a significant issue for public access to information. Critics argue that these companies are systematically removing nonrenewable resources from the public record. In some instances, the reports indicate that these destroyed items include the last remaining copies of original works.
The advocacy groups allege that this behavior violates Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts in commerce. They contend that by hoarding and liquidating the physical source material, AI firms are securing an anticompetitive advantage. This allows them to function as the sole gatekeepers of human knowledge while preventing smaller companies or the general public from accessing the same materials.
The push for federal oversight follows investigative reporting, including a recent piece by 404 Media that identified Amazon as a participant in these activities. While a federal judge previously ruled in 2025 that Anthropic did not violate copyright law by training its Claude model on purchased books, this new challenge focuses on the physical destruction of the books rather than intellectual property rights. The groups are calling for the FTC to establish the exact volume of this practice and to identify the extent to which unique or rare cultural texts are lost permanently through this process.