Airtag in Rare Book Leads to Amazon Warehouse Destroying Books for AI Training

According to 404 Media, a bookseller agreed to plant an Airtag in a rare book that was part of a bulk order suspected to be destined for an AI company. The tracker was followed across the country to a warehouse designated VGT3 in Las Vegas. Employees there said the facility receives large shipments of printed books and that their job is to cut the spines off and scan pages quickly, destroying the original book in the process.

The warehouse team's logo is a dinosaur holding a book in its claws, described by 404 Media as a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book. Amazon did not dispute the findings but declined to comment on AI training specifically. In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said, "Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use." The statement does not mention AI or book destruction.

Rare and out-of-print books are prized as training data for large language models because they are not available on the internet and are unlikely to contain AI-generated text. Using material written before 2022, the year LLMs became widespread, helps avoid "model collapse," a degradation in output quality that can occur when models train on AI-generated text.