AI Companies Are Burning Books, Advocates Complain to FTC
The groups say the practice could create private chokepoints and raise rivals' costs by removing rare books from public access.
- On Friday, 18 advocacy groups led by the Demand Progress Education Fund urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate major AI companies for buying, scanning, and destroying physical books used to train large language models.
- Anthropic operated a secret book scanning initiative codenamed "Project Panama" and Amazon is also allegedly destroying physical copies to save storage costs after digitizing texts for AI training.
- Groups described the practice as "destructive," arguing that AI developers are "starving the market" of critical source materials and potentially destroying rare, non-renewable works that may be the last surviving copies.
- "This hoard-and-destroy practice could serve as yet another structural mechanism to raise rival companies' costs," Demand Progress Education Fund Special Advisor Kate Oh said, urging FTC intervention on anticompetitive grounds.
- Critics warn these actions could allow wealthy incumbents to monopolize humanity's written works, engineering a future where only dominant AI firms can build high-quality models using exclusive access to source materials.
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U.S. civic groups have labeled the practice of AI companies purchasing large quantities of paper books and destroying originals as unfair business practices and have requested an investigation by the FTC. This issue stems from concerns about market monopoly, specifically the preemption of high-quality training data and the blocking of competitors' access, and is emerging as a new regulatory issue as data competition intensifies.
(San Francisco = Yonhap News) Correspondent Kwon Young-jeon = Regarding the practice of giant tech companies hoarding and destroying books in bulk for artificial intelligence (AI) training, U.S. civil society...
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 co…
Consumer groups urge FTC to probe AI companies for hoarding and destroying books
Consumer groups urge FTC to probe AI companies for hoarding and destroying books Click this link for the original source of this article. Author: CBS News This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.offthepress.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the...
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