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We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

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  • Simon Willison highlights 404 Media’s investigative report, which provides concrete evidence that Amazon is systematically acquiring large volumes of physical books, often through anonymous orders, for destructive scanning and use as AI training data.
  • 404 Media tracked a shipment of approximately 1,000 books using an Apple AirTag, which led directly to the VGT3 corner of the LAS8 Amazon facility in Las Vegas.
  • Online forum discussions among Amazon workers confirmed that the VGT3 facility “destructively scans large volumes of books,” corroborating long-held suspicions about tech companies’ book acquisition practices for AI.
  • This investigation confirms the active and systematic efforts by major tech companies like Amazon to feed AI models with copyrighted material, raising significant questions about transparency, ethics, and compensation in the AI training data supply chain.