Exclusive: FTC urged to investigate AI firms for destroying books; Axios, August 21, 2026

 Ashley Gold, Axios ; Exclusive: FTC urged to investigate AI firms for destroying books

"The Federal Trade Commission is being urged to investigate AI companies for buying, scanning and destroying books to train AI, per a letter shared first with Axios.

Why it matters: If the FTC agrees, the fight over AI training data may move from copyright into competition. 

That could include regulators scrutinizing whether dominant AI firms are literally eliminating resources their rivals need to compete.

Driving the news: More than a dozen civil society groups are urging the FTC to use its authority to examine what the letter's authors call a "destructive new data acquisition practice by dominant AI companies."

The groups include Demand Progress Education Fund, the Consumer Federation of America and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

In January, the Washington Post, citing court filings, reported that Anthropic spent millions to acquire and physically remove the spines of books to feed their scanned pages into Claude. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have faced similar copyright lawsuits, per the Post.

Specifically, the groups want the FTC to determine whether such conduct constitutes an unfair method of competition, arguing that any AI company that does so is "starving the market" of critical source materials.

The letter points out that in some cases, rare books could be destroyed forever, with digital firms snagging the last copies."

The Court’s Hypocrisy; The New York Times, June 29, 2026

 The Editorial Board, The New York Times; The Court’s Hypocrisy

"For nearly a century, the Supreme Court has made it difficult for a president to defy the clear text of a law passed by Congress. The court prevented Franklin D. Roosevelt from firing a leader of the Federal Trade Commission in 1935. It stopped the Reagan administration from defying a pollution investigation in 1988. It helped block Barack Obama’s attempt to expand immigration protections in 2016.

Its decision Monday allowing President Trump to fire F.T.C. commissioners represents a break with this history. The ruling dismisses longstanding precedent and effectively discards a 112-year-old law that said the president could fire commissioners only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” Mr. Trump can now fire commissioners in regulatory agencies simply because he wants to...

Central to the success of the American experiment over nearly 250 years has been the balance of powers among the three branches of government. Together, Mr. Trump and this Supreme Court are upsetting that balance. They are deviating from a tradition that has lasted more than a century, in which parts of the government operate with bipartisan leadership removed from everyday partisan politics, as Congress intended. The effect is to sideline Congress, which the authors of the Constitution viewed as the primary branch among equals. The Supreme Court on Monday created a government run by a very small number of people who work at either the Supreme Court or the White House."

Transportation Secretary Duffy filmed a reality show, funded by firms he regulates; NPR, May 12, 2026

 Rachel Treisman, NPR; Transportation Secretary Duffy filmed a reality show, funded by firms he regulates

"On Monday, the nonprofit government watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with Transportation's Office of Inspector General, accusing Duffy of violating federal gift and travel rules, and calling on the Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General to investigate.

"You have everyday Americans who are struggling with the price of gas, struggling with the costs of everyday items, and you have the cabinet secretary announcing that he is going on a trip with his entire family, which appears to have been funded by the industries that his department is overseeing," CREW president Donald Sherman tells NPR...

As the trailer made the rounds on social media, many commenters asked how the trip was paid for. Some worried it was costing taxpayers, while others said its product placement — like the Toyota car, a Japanese brand, prominently featured in the video — raised questions of corruption. Sherman, of CREW, agrees.

"One has to wonder whether the decision to prominently feature Toyota in this project is because Toyota paid for a sponsorship or because the secretary actually thinks that promoting Toyota is in the best interest of the American public, American automakers and the people that work for that industry," he said."...

The Great American Road Trip Inc. describes itself as an independent nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization, "fully funding its own efforts to celebrate and share America's story." (An IRS database search did not yield any results for an organization by that name, and Barnes did not respond to NPR's requests for an identification number.)

The nonprofit's website lists over a dozen sponsors "powering America's road trip," most of which are in the travel or transportation industry. They include Toyota, Boeing and Royal Caribbean, which Sherman says have been subject to investigation — and in some cases, fines — by the Department of Transportation in recent years "and certainly could be in the future."

"[The nonprofit] has become a vehicle for providing access, to its sponsors, to a cabinet secretary, which should make everyday Americans who cannot pay for similar access really concerned," Sherman adds."

Duffy’s ‘Great American Road Trip’ Prompts Ethical Concerns; The New York Times, May 13, 2026

 Karoun Demirjian, The New York Times; Duffy’s ‘Great American Road Trip’ Prompts Ethical Concerns

"On May 1, Sean P. Duffy was in New Orleans, touring its container terminals in his official capacity as the secretary of transportation.

Then, he climbed behind the wheel of a car with his family on the final, all-expenses paid stop for “The Great American Road Trip,” a slickly produced YouTube series that has raised questions about self-promotion and gifts his family may have accepted as he conducted official business as a prominent member of the Trump administration.

The series, filmed across 10 states and Washington, D.C., over the course of seven months, is part of the department’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the United States this year. But it doubled as a set of family excursions for Mr. Duffy, his wife and his children, who traveled to national parks and major landmarks paid for by Great American Road Trip Inc., a nonprofit that names among its sponsors Toyota, United Airlines and Boeing.

Mr. Duffy has said that ethics and budget officials in the department cleared the project. But the corporate ties — and the show’s timing, with gas prices rising — drew immediate blowback on social media when the trailer was released, announcing that it will air beginning in June. The average price of gas has gone up more than 40 percent since the war with Iran started in February."

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg On Data Privacy Fail: 'We Were Way Too Idealistic'; NPR, April 5, 2018

Vanessa Romo, NPR; Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg On Data Privacy Fail: 'We Were Way Too Idealistic'

[Kip Currier: Interesting Public Relations strategy that Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg tested out with NPR.
What do you think--was it "idealistic" naivete, careless indifference, an intentional component of Facebook's business model and strategic planning, willful blindness, negligence, and/or something else?]

""We really believed in social experiences. We really believed in protecting privacy. But we were way too idealistic. We did not think enough about the abuse cases," [Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg] said.

Facebook, the world's largest social media company, is in the middle of a reputational crisis and faces questions from lawmakers and regulatory agencies after the political research firm Cambridge Analytica collected information on as many as 87 million people without their permission. Previous estimates had put the number of users affected at 50 million.

Now the company, which has lost about $100 billion in stock value since February, is reviewing its data policies — and changing some of them — to find better methods of protecting user data.

And its leaders are apologizing.

"We know that we did not do enough to protect people's data," Sandberg said. "I'm really sorry for that. Mark [Zuckerberg] is really sorry for that, and what we're doing now is taking really firm action."

The Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether Facebook violated a 2011 consent decree by allowing third parties to have unrestricted access to user data without users' permission and contrary to user preferences and expectations.

The penalties for violating the order would be devastating, even for Facebook. At $40,000 per violation, the total cost could theoretically run into the billions."