FTC Urged to Probe AI Firms for Destroying Millions of Books

The Federal Trade Commission is being urged to investigate major artificial intelligence companies for allegedly purchasing and scanning millions of books—including rare volumes—then destroying the originals to keep digital copies in private databases.

In a letter sent Friday to FTC Chair Lina Khan, the Demand Progress Education Fund and a coalition of 17 civil society organizations accused AI firms such as Anthropic and Amazon of engaging in what they describe as a reckless and secretive practice that could harm competition and public access to cultural materials.

The letter, which invokes the FTC’s authority under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act, requests an investigation into whether the bulk acquisition, scanning, and destruction of books—many of which are later stored in proprietary, inaccessible digital formats—constitutes an unfair method of competition. The signatories argue that by becoming the sole custodians of vast collections of digitized works, these companies are creating private chokepoints over shared cultural and historical records.

“When a small number of dominant tech companies become the sole custodians of millions of human-authored works in digital form, locked away inside proprietary corporate databases—including works they have caused to exist nowhere else—they convert a shared public resource into a private chokepoint,” the letter states. “They make themselves the unaccountable gatekeepers of our shared historical and cultural record, with the ability to censor as they see fit.”

The coalition includes organizations such as the Consumer Federation of America, the Center for Media & Digital Governance at the Open Markets Institute, and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. In a statement, Demand Progress Education Fund Special Advisor Kate Oh described the practice as “secretive and reckless,” adding that credible reporting suggests the industry is acquiring books on a vast commercial scale to scan and destroy them, retaining control of the digital text.

The FTC has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Meanwhile, a separate report from the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP) highlights growing concerns over consolidation in the healthcare sector, calling it a “Big Medicine disease” that has driven up costs and reduced patient access. The report, “Break Up Big Medicine,” co-authored by Morgan Harper, AELP’s director of policy and advocacy, and senior policy analyst Emma Freer, argues that decades of neoliberal policy have empowered corporate healthcare giants at the expense of patients and independent providers.

According to the report, employer-sponsored family health coverage costs nearly tripled between 2005 and 2025, rising from $12,214 to $35,119 annually. U.S. patients pay nearly three times more for prescription drugs than people in other countries, and the U.S. spends over $15,000 per person on healthcare each year—roughly one-fifth of the nation’s economy—yet achieves worse outcomes than peer nations.

The report identifies six corporate behemoths—Cardinal Health, Cencora, Cigna, CVS Health, McKesson, and UnitedHealth Group—as among the most dominant, collectively earning nearly $34 billion in annual profit and employing more than four out of five U.S. doctors. The authors attribute rising costs to federal policies that prioritized private insurers over addressing root causes of high prices.

To address the crisis, the report proposes a four-part plan: breaking up consolidated healthcare entities, capping prices using Medicare rates as benchmarks, investing in public healthcare options, and strengthening antitrust enforcement. It also points to several pending bills in Congress, including the Break Up Big Medicine Act and the Patients Before Monopolies Act, as legislative avenues for reform.

Healthcare professionals, including Dr. Will Flanary, an ophthalmologist based in Portland, Oregon, who practices under the name “Dr. Glaucomflecken” on social media, have joined the call for reform. Flanary writes in the report’s foreword that the dominance of corporate healthcare has made it difficult for independent practices to survive and has led to moral injury among physicians.

“This agenda presents a roadmap for how to put patients and clinicians back in control,” Harper said. “The choice now is clear: continue watching the system spiral into profit-driven chaos or treat the disease at its root.”