For months, rare booksellers have whispered about bulk buyers snapping up expensive volumes only to have them disappear. Now there’s proof, and it points squarely at one of the biggest companies on earth. 404 Media partnered with a bookseller to plant an Apple AirTag inside a rare book that was part of a bulk order. The tracker wound up at a Las Vegas facility operated by Amazon, where a team was busy tearing books from their spines and scanning the pages for AI training data.
The facility, known internally as VGT3, apparently has a sense of humor about the whole thing — or a staggering lack of self-awareness. The team’s warehouse door features a logo of a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book. That choice of mascot feels almost designed to antagonize the booksellers and preservationists who have been sounding alarms about exactly this practice for the better part of a year.
Amazon’s response to the report was brief and carefully worded. “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” a company spokesperson said. Notably absent from that statement: any mention of AI training, rare books, or destruction. The company declined to elaborate.
The stakes here are straightforward. Amazon is building what it considers frontier AI models, and frontier models are hungry for unique training data. Rare books offer exactly that — text that hasn’t been scraped a thousand times from the open web. Rivals Anthropic and xAI have publicly stated they don’t train on rare or antique books, which puts Amazon’s silence on the matter in sharper relief. The real question now is whether this practice scales quietly or becomes a reputational problem Amazon can no longer ignore. Booksellers just got a lot better at finding out.
