AI companies accused of hoarding and destroying millions of books

More than a dozen public interest and consumer advocacy groups are urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate leading artificial intelligence developers for allegedly buying, scanning and destroying books used to train their large language models, a practice the organizations described as “destructive” and anticompetitive.

In a letter to FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Mark Meador on Friday, the Demand Progress Education Fund, Consumer Federation of America and Institute for Local Self-Reliance, among other groups, said the AI companies are buying books in bulk, digitizing the content to train their AI apps and then destroying the physical copies. In some cases, the destroyed books are among the last surviving copies of original works, according to the letter.  

Such “hoard-and-destroy” practices, as critics call them, could make it harder for the public and for other AI companies to access essential source material, the groups argue. Destroying books could also constitute an unfair method of competition under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which bars unfair or deceptive acts or practices in commerce, they allege.

“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 and operate as the sole holders of humanity’s written works — after having destroyed the originals to get there,” the letter states. 

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

The groups cite an August 2024 copyright lawsuit brought by writer Andrea Bartz and others against AI developer Anthropic, which they accused of acquiring, scanning and discarding millions of print books. In 2025, a judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of legally purchased books to train its AI model, Claude, did not violate copyright law. 

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A separate investigation by digital publisher 404 Media this week reported that Amazon is buying books in bulk, scanning them to train its AI tools and then destroying them. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.