Secret tracker in rare book ends up at Amazon warehouse linked to AI book processing
An investigation revealed that Amazon is purchasing large quantities of books to feed into an AI training pipeline at a specialized facility. The process involves scanning books and destroying them, raising concerns about copyright and the methods used for AI data acquisition.
Why it matters
This highlights the controversial intersection of AI development, intellectual property rights, and the physical destruction of literature for data harvesting.
A bookseller who suspected that an anonymous order for around 1,000 titles was headed into an AI training pipeline decided to stop guessing. Working with 404 Media, the seller slipped an Apple AirTag into one volume and shipped the order through Biblio, a marketplace that keeps buyers anonymous. The tracker flew out of a California airport, landed outside Milwaukee, then sat for two weeks in a distribution warehouse near Kenosha Regional Airport before heading west by truck, pausing overnight at a travel centre near Grand Junction, Colorado.Its final stop was an Amazon warehouse called LAS8 in Las Vegas. More precisely, the north end of it, which houses a separate Amazon operation coded VGT3, where books arrive, lose their bindings to a cutter, get scanned, and are thrown out.
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