Civil Society Groups Demand Federal Investigation into AI Giants' Mass Book Acquisition and Destruction
A coalition of American civil society groups has called for a federal investigation into reports that artificial intelligence (AI) companies are mass-purchasing physical books, scanning them to train their AI models, and subsequently destroying the originals. In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the coalition highlighted that at least one prominent AI company, Anthropic, is known to have acquired millions of print books in bulk, digitized them, and then discarded the physical copies. This practice, referred to as 'hoard and destroy,' leaves only the digitized text within the company's proprietary database for training large language models like Claude. An internal Anthropic memo, titled 'Project Panama,' revealed the company's effort to 'destructively scan all the books in the world' and advised secrecy around the project. Reports also indicate that Amazon is involved in similar large-scale book-buying operations where bindings are cut for faster scanning. The coalition argues that this behav... 
