Amazon · Apple · Anthropic · Decrypt
Rare Books Traced to Amazon AI Teaching Facility to Be Scanned and Destroyed
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★ Tier-1 Source
AI companies are scanning truckloads of books, sometimes rare ones, and often destroying them in the process to train their models—and now they have some idea of which companies and how they’re doing it.
Key facts
- Independent tech media publication 404 Media placed a tracking device inside a shipment of rare books and watched it travel to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas where the company scans and destroys
- Pirated copies are a different matter: Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement over scanned pirated titles, and Salesforce now faces a class action over alleged book piracy
- Books printed before 2022 carry text that isn't mostly readily available online and, crucially, isn't machine-written
- The investigation, published Monday, is the first to publicly pinpoint where bulk book purchases tied to AI training end up
Summary
An Apple AirTag hidden in a major book order led to an investigation that tracked the shipment to Amazon's VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas. Workers there cut book spines so pages feed a scanner faster, destroying the printed book in the process. Amazon confirmed it "purchases books through commercial channels" and said the operation hadn't been reported before. Independent tech media publication 404 Media placed a tracking device inside a shipment of rare books and watched it travel to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas where the company scans and destroys printed books to train AI.