15 Groups Urge FTC to Probe AI Firms Over Destroying Millions of Books

Q: How many irreplaceable physical books have already been secretly shredded by anonymous intermediaries feeding the AI industry's insatiable data hunger?

No verified public count exists. What is documented so far shows the scale is at least very large, but how many of those books were truly irreplaceable remains unknown. Court records in Bartz v. Anthropic showed Anthropic’s “Project Panama” was built to acquire, scan and destroy books at industrial scale. Vendor materials cited in reporting described plans to process roughly 500,000 to 2 million books over six months, and plaintiffs alleged millions of print books were acquired, scanned and discarded. Recent reporting by 404 Media also tied Amazon to a similar operation, but no company has disclosed totals. What is missing is the critical denominator: how many destroyed copies were rare, last-available, or otherwise irreplaceable. Advocacy groups pressing the FTC say some books may have been among the last surviving copies, but they are asking regulators to investigate precisely because that number is not yet known. Bulk buying through intermediaries and anonymous sourcing services has made the practice difficult to trace title by title. So the most accurate answer is that the public evidence supports destruction on a scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of books, but there is no reliable published figure for how many were irreplaceable physical copies. That unanswered question is now central to calls for an FTC probe, because the potential harm is not just to authors or copyright holders but to public access, scholarship and competition in the AI market.

3 articles · Updated · CBS New York · Aug 21

More than 15 public-interest and consumer groups asked the FTC on Friday to investigate AI developers for allegedly buying books in bulk, scanning them for model training and then destroying the physical copies.
The letter says the practice can eliminate some of the last surviving originals, restrict public and rival access to source material, and amount to an unfair method of competition under Section 5 of the FTC Act.
Anthropic is cited in an August 2024 copyright suit accusing it of acquiring, scanning and discarding millions of print books; a judge in 2025 ruled its use of legally purchased books to train Claude did not violate copyright.
Amazon also came under scrutiny after 404 Media reported this week that it buys books in bulk, scans them for AI tools and destroys them, though neither company immediately commented.
The groups want the FTC to measure how widespread the practice is and how many destroyed volumes were the last remaining copies, framing the issue as a threat to competition and preservation.

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Are tech giants permanently destroying the world's last remaining copies of rare books just to train their artificial intelligence models?

How many irreplaceable physical books have already been secretly shredded by anonymous intermediaries feeding the AI industry's insatiable data hunger?