A coalition of 18 advocacy organisations has formally asked the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate AI companies for buying physical books, scanning them for use as AI training data, and then destroying the originals. The complaint, revealed on Friday, centres on practices by Anthropic and Amazon, and argues the destruction of these texts is anti-competitive, stripping rivals and the public of access to irreplaceable resources while allowing the wealthiest firms to become sole custodians of digitised human knowledge.

Details of Anthropic's operation, codenamed "Project Panama," emerged through document disclosures in the Bartz v. Anthropic PBC copyright case, with a 2024 internal memo describing it as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world" and instructing staff to keep it secret. Older books are prized because they predate AI-generated text contamination, and destroying them after scanning cuts storage costs; a US court previously accepted this scan-and-destroy approach as fair use in Anthropic's case, though a similar defence failed for the Internet Archive. Book-data broker ISBNdb has since distanced itself from the practice, while Amazon and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment on the advocacy groups' letter.