AI companies are burning books, advocates complain to FTC

AI companies are buying loads of physical books, hoovering up the texts for model training, and then physically destroying the originals.

A group of 18 advocacy organizations on Friday asked the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate the book butchering and knowledge hoarding.

Fresh details of the practice emerged earlier this year via document disclosures in Bartz v.

Anthropic PBC, a copyright case brought by authors of books that the AI company used for training without permission.

Anthropic's book scan-and-destroy operation was known as "Project Panama." It was described in a 2024 internal memo as "our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world." Anthropic gave the operation a codename "because we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this," the court exhibit explains.

"This document is visible to all Anthropic employees, but you should avoid talking about it in public areas, and the fact that we are working on this should not be shared with anyone outside Anthropic." Older books turn out to be valuable for AI training because they're unpolluted by AI-generated text, which has been seeping into recent written work.

And destroying books once they've been scanned avoids the cost of storage.

In some circumstances, scan-and-destroy operations may support fair use claims.

In the Bartz case, the district court accepted the argument that a physical book can be digitized and destroyed, substituting the electronic copy for the physical book in a transformative act of fair use.

But that didn't work out for the Internet Archive.

Anthropic, which did not respond to a request for comment, is not the only company consuming and trashing texts.

A recent report found Amazon has been participating in book scanning and shredding.

Amazon also did not respond to a request for comment.

The subject has become a public relations headache, in part because of the barbarism of book destruction and its association with authoritarian regimes, and in part because of the broad backlash against AI companies for pillaging public resources in pursuit of private gain.