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

A 404 Media investigation tracked a shipment of rare books using a hidden tracking device and discovered that Amazon operates a facility in Las Vegas where it purchases books in bulk, scans them for AI training data, and destroys them in the process. The facility, called VGT3, removes book bindings to scan pages more quickly, with the printed books destroyed during this operation. This revelation confirms that major AI companies are acquiring massive quantities of books to train their models, targeting printed texts that contain material not readily available online.