AI companies are scanning truckloads of books, sometimes rare ones, and often destroying them in the process to train their models—and now we have some idea of which companies and how they’re doing it.
Independent tech media publication 404 Media placed a tracking device inside a shipment of rare books and watched it travel to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas where the company scans and destroys printed books to train AI.
Myriad: When will OpenAI release GPT-6? Click to make your prediction. The final stop was Amazon's VGT3 team. Employees told the outlet all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books, then cut the bindings off so the pages feed a scanner more quickly. The book is destroyed in the process. The team's extremely fitting logo is a dinosaur clutching a book in its claws.
Image: 404 MediaWhy printed books are suddenly in demand Books printed before 2022 carry text that isn't mostly readily available online and, crucially, isn't machine-written. Training a model on its own kind of output risks "model collapse," where quality degrades with each recursive loop.
So, pre-2022 paper is clean fuel for AI training.
The Amazon operation stayed quiet for a structural reason. Booksellers noticed a spike in bulk orders over the past year and suspected AI companies were behind them—the buyers weren't price-sensitive and picked titles seemingly at random. Their concerns were finally confirmed by an AirTag revealing the destination.
Amazon said it "purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use."
