For the past year or so, booksellers have suspected that AI firms are buying up huge lots of rare books, then destroying them after scanning them to train AI. But this was hard to prove until now, as 404 Media reports that an Airtag hidden in a rare book shows that at least one tech giant, in the race to advance its frontier models, is behind some of the bulk orders: Amazon. On Monday, 404 Media revealed that it had connected with a bookseller who agreed to plant an Airtag in a rare book that was part of a bulk order. That Airtag was then tracked to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning pages, 404 Media reported. Apparently tone-deaf to the escalating backlash over destructive book scanning, a logo on the door of that team’s warehouse, VGT3, showed a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book, 404 Media documented.
Amazon deflects #
Amazon declined to comment on 404 Media’s findings, only providing Ars with the same statement it gave to 404 Media, which does not mention AI training specifically.
“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” Amazon’s statement said.
However, Amazon is developing what it considers frontier AI models, which require a massive amount of unique training data to stay competitive with leading firms like Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic. Right now, firms carefully guard their training data to avoid losing an edge. And training models on text from rare books that are difficult to find would seemingly offer an advantage for Amazon, especially since rivals like Anthropic and xAI have publicly stated that they are not training on rare or antique books.