404 Media Tracked a Rare Book to an Amazon AI Training Facility That Destroys It
404 Media · rss · 2026-08-17
A 404 Media investigation has confirmed, for the first time, that Amazon is buying massive quantities of printed books for AI training data and destroying the physical books in the process.
Method: Booksellers had reported a historic spike in anonymous bulk purchases over the past year—buyers were price-insensitive and chose seemingly random titles. 404 Media placed an Apple AirTag inside a rare book, then followed it across the country to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Inside the warehouse: Employees there say all they do is receive huge shipments of books and cut off the bindings to scan them faster, destroying the books. The team, codenamed VGT3, has a dinosaur clutching a book as its logo.
Why books matter: Printed books contain text not readily available online (which has already been scraped), are well organized, and—if printed before 2022—are guaranteed free of AI-generated text, avoiding recursive "model collapse." Amazon said it "purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use."
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