404 Media's AirTag sting reveals Amazon shredding rare books for AI training

For over a year, booksellers suspected AI firms were buying rare book lots and destroying them after scanning. 404 Media proved it by planting an AirTag inside a rare book from a bulk order, then tracking it to Amazon's VGT3 facility in Las Vegas. There, a dedicated team tears books from their spines and scans pages—a process captured by a logo on the door showing a Tyrannosaurus rex devouring a book. Amazon declined to comment on the investigation, providing only a generic statement about purchasing books through commercial channels to improve products and services.

The exposure arrives as Amazon races to develop frontier AI models that need massive, unique training data. Unlike rivals Anthropic and xAI, which publicly claim they don't train on rare or antique books, Amazon appears to be systematically scanning ISBNs to check books off a global catalog. Workers' online discussions revealed that earlier this year, the warehouse nearly ran out of books to scan, underscoring the scale of the appetite. While some workers see the gig as flexible and "nice," critics like investor Michael Burry have called the destructive practice "evil incarnate." The practice also pressures booksellers, who face an ethical dilemma between profitable bulk sales and preserving historically valuable but low-monetary-value works—especially foreign-language titles long out of print.