The US Federal Trade Commission Is Urged to Investigate AI Company's Book Burning Behavior

BlockBeats News, August 22, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is being urged to investigate some AI companies' behavior of acquiring AI training data by purchasing, scanning, and destroying books. According to a public letter obtained by Axios, more than ten civil society organizations are calling on the FTC to use its regulatory power to review so-called "disruptive data acquisition practices" by large AI companies. Earlier, The Washington Post, citing court documents, reported that Anthropic had spent millions of dollars to purchase books, dismantle their spines, scan the pages for training Claude; Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have also faced similar copyright lawsuits.

These organizations hope that the FTC will further assess whether such behavior constitutes an unfair competitive tactic. They believe that AI companies, by acquiring and destroying physical books, may actually be "hollowing out" key data resources in the market, especially since some rare books may permanently disappear as a result, with digital companies holding the last few physical copies. The related organizations warn that this "hoarding and destruction" practice may increase competitors' data acquisition costs, while cutting off crucial raw resources for training models for fledgling AI companies, thereby further widening the competitive moat of leading AI enterprises.

However, these organizations are not asking the FTC to restrict AI model training but rather hoping that the regulatory agency will focus on the act of destroying existing works and take intervention measures before large AI companies leverage this to establish a market advantage. The public letter states that this practice is not merely a data acquisition strategy but could become another structural means for top AI companies to build an "insurmountable systemic moat." Currently, under the Trump administration, the FTC hopes to maintain a relatively business-friendly regulatory environment in the United States while also continuously expressing concerns about market competition and the risk of monopoly by large tech companies.

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