We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
Amazon confirmed to be bulk-purchasing and destructively scanning rare books for AI training data
“In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces.”
404 Media used an AirTag to track a bulk book order and confirmed it ended at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas where workers say books are destructively scanned for AI training. This is the first physical, investigative confirmation of what has been widely suspected — that major AI labs are quietly purchasing large volumes of physical books through anonymous bulk orders. The finding raises serious copyright and ethics questions and implicates Amazon directly in covert AI training data acquisition.