Are AI companies acquiring books, scanning them for training data, and destroying the physical copies? Yes, but the reality is much less dire than popular coverage suggests.
Last week, the Demand Progress Education Fund sent a coalition letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the agency to investigate whether such bulk book digitization, "including [of] rare, out-of-print titles with few surviving copies," is anticompetitive behavior that illegally protects AI companies from competition. The focal point of the letter is Project Panama, Anthropic's self-described "effort to destructively scan all the books in the world."
