Amazon buys printed books in bulk, scans them for AI training data, and destroys them in the process. That's what an investigation by 404 Media found after placing an AirTag inside a shipment of rare books and tracking it across the country.

The shipment ended up at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, home to a team called VGT3 whose logo features a Tyrannosaurus rex holding a book. Workers there say they cut off book spines to speed up scanning, destroying the copies in the process. Amazon uses the scanned data to train its Nova models. A spokesperson said the company buys books through commercial channels to improve its products.

Booksellers suspect that AI companies are trying to systematically scan every book by ISBN number. Printed texts are especially valuable because they often don't exist online and predate 2022, meaning they're free of AI-generated content.

Amazon isn't alone here. Anthropic ran a similar operation. A lawsuit by book authors revealed its "Project Panama," where Anthropic bought books on marketplaces, cut off their spines, and digitized them. The judge in that case ruled the scanning qualified as fair use and didn't violate copyright, partly because the printed originals were destroyed and therefore not copied and resold.

Both companies are turning sometimes rare books into private training material. The practice is controversial because they destroy originals that may be irreplaceable, pulling knowledge off public shelves and locking it inside the closed AI models of a single corporation.

404 Media