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Journalists and a rare bookseller tracked shipments of rare books to Amazon's LAS8 warehouse in Las Vegas using a hidden AirTag. The shipment led to an operation known as VGT3, where the books are scanned to provide training data for Amazon's AI. Workers at the site cut the bindings off the books to accelerate the scanning process before the physical copies are destroyed.
Amazon provided a statement but declined to explain why the books are destroyed or disclose how many such facilities it operates globally. The revelation has sparked backlash from critics and collectors over the destruction of physical cultural artifacts to fuel digital model training.
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Key sources
- SOURCE@jason_koebler“stuck an AirTag in a book and we tracked it”x.com
- SUPPORT@brianstelter“A rare bookseller suspected his books were being bought by AI companies”x.com
- SUPPORT@intcyberdigest“workers say they cut the bindings off books to scan them faster”x.com
- SUPPORT@mazzenilsson“did not respond to questions about why it cut the books it scanned”x.com
- SUPPORT@daveweigel“buying massive shipments of rare books, scanning and destroying them to train AI”x.com
- SUPPORT@emanuelmaiberg“company scans books for training data and destroys them in the process”x.com