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Event date: August 12, 2026
Consumer Groups Ask FTC to Investigate AI Companies Over Book Scanning and Destruction
Since 404 Media's July 21 report on bulk book orders tied to an Amazon warehouse, and since court documents from the Anthropic copyright case became public last year, the AI book-scanning story has moved from bookseller message boards to a federal regulatory complaint.
On Friday, more than a dozen public interest and consumer groups, including the Demand Progress Education Fund, the Consumer Federation of America and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, sent a letter to FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Mark Meador asking the agency to investigate AI companies for what the groups called "hoard-and-destroy" practices, according to CBS News.
The letter alleges AI developers are buying books in bulk, scanning them to train large language models, then destroying the physical copies, sometimes the last surviving copies of a given work. The groups argue this could violate Section 5 of the FTC Act, which bars unfair methods of competition, because it locks smaller AI developers and the public out of source material that only the biggest, richest companies can afford to buy up first.
If a handful of companies are the only entities that can afford
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