**[U.S. Federal Trade Commission Urged to Investigate AI Companies Destroying Books]** BlockBeats News, August 22 – The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is being urged to investigate certain AI companies for acquiring AI training data by purchasing, scanning, and destroying books. According to an open letter obtained by Axios, more than ten civil society organizations are calling on the FTC to use its regulatory authority to examine what they describe as a "destructive new method of data acquisition" by major AI companies. Previously, *The Washington Post*, citing court documents, reported that Anthropic had spent millions of dollars purchasing books, removing their spines, and scanning the pages to train its AI model, Claude. Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have also faced similar copyright lawsuits. These organizations are urging the FTC to determine whether such actions constitute unfair competition practices. They argue that by acquiring and destroying physical books, AI companies may be "hollowing out the market" for critical data resources, especially as some rare books could permanently disappear, leaving digital companies with the last remaining physical copies. The organizations warn that this "hoarding and destruction" approach could increase data acquisition costs for competitors while cutting off essential original materials that startup AI companies rely on to train their models, thereby further entrenching the competitive barriers of leading AI firms. However, these organizations are not asking the FTC to restrict AI model training itself but are instead urging regulators to focus on the act of destroying existing works and to intervene before large AI companies use this practice to establish market dominance. The open letter states that this practice is not merely a data acquisition strategy but could become another structural method for leading AI companies to build "insurmountable systemic moats." Currently, under the leadership of the Biden administration, the FTC is striving to maintain a regulatory environment that is relatively friendly to U.S. businesses while also signaling ongoing concerns about market competition and the risks of monopolization by large tech companies. Click the link below to join the Beating · Feishu AI News Channel for 24/7 global AI news and updates. [Original Link]