AirTag reveals Amazon is destroying rare books to train AI

Amazon – the company that started out selling books online – is reportedly buying up rare and out-of-print books, cutting them apart and scanning them to train AI models. The practice was uncovered by 404 Media: journalists hid an Apple AirTag inside a rare book and tracked it to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas known as VGT3.

According to TechCrunch, the facility is marked by a dinosaur logo holding a book. There, book spines are cut off at scale and pages are machine-scanned – a destructive process that leaves the books unusable.

Amazon told 404 Media only that it "purchases books through commercial channels to improve the products and services customers use." The company declined to comment on volumes, titles, or how it handles particularly rare copies.

The appetite for printed originals has a technical reason: freely available internet text is already in the models – and texts from before 2022 are considered "clean" because they are guaranteed not to be AI-generated. That lowers the risk of so-called model collapse, where models degrade by ingesting AI output.

The practice echoes the Anthropic case: that company scanned millions of books and, over previously pirated copies, agreed to a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in July 2026. Amazon's purchases reportedly run through commercial channels – but the debate over the cultural loss of rare works is likely to intensify.