An Apple AirTag hidden inside a rare book has traced Amazon’s bulk book buying to a Las Vegas warehouse where, according to workers there, the books are sliced apart, scanned and thrown away. The books-for-AI-training pipeline that second-hand booksellers have suspected for over a year now has a physical address, and it took one consumer-grade Bluetooth tracker to find it.
The investigation was published on 17 August by Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media. A bookseller who had received an unusually large order — roughly 1,000 books, bought through the Biblio marketplace — slipped an AirTag into one of them and let the shipment go. The tracker moved across several US states and stopped at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada.
What the AirTag found at Amazon’s book scanning site
Inside that warehouse is an Amazon team known internally as VGT3. Employees told 404 Media that the job is simple and singular: pallets of printed books arrive, staff cut the bindings off so the pages can be fed through scanners faster, and the physical book does not survive the process. The team’s logo, on the door, is a dinosaur baring its teeth with a book in its hands.
Two details make this more than a curiosity. First, from worker discussions on forums, 404 Media reported that staff scan a book’s barcode or ISBN before scanning the book itself. An ISBN identifies a specific edition, so working through ISBNs is what you would do if the goal were to cover every printed edition in existence rather than to collect good books. Second, it explains the buying pattern booksellers found strange — the buyers pass over celebrated first editions and go after cheap, obscure, untranslated, short-run titles. Those are exactly the books whose text does not already exist online.
That is the real prize here. Anything printed after roughly 2022 risks containing machine-written text, and models trained on model output degrade. Human-written pre-2022 print is a fixed, shrinking supply, and paper that was never digitised is the last of it that no rival has already scraped.
What Amazon says, and what it does not say
Amazon declined to comment on the findings. It gave the same line to 404 Media and to Ars Technica:
Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.
Read that carefully. It does not mention AI, it does not mention scanning, and it does not mention destroying anything. It neither confirms nor contradicts a word of the reporting — which is the point of a sentence built that way. If a company is comfortable with a practice, describing it is usually cheaper than issuing a statement engineered to survive any version of the story.
The gap that should bother readers is a different one. Ars Technica notes that rivals including Anthropic and xAI have publicly stated they are not training on rare or antique books. Amazon has drawn no such line in public.
Why this is legal — for now
Destructive scanning survives because of how a US court read copyright law. In 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s use of lawfully purchased books was transformative and therefore fair use. Buying a book and scanning it is legal; destroying the paper copy afterwards is part of what keeps the arithmetic clean, since one copy exists before and one after.
The trade itself is split. Some second-hand dealers are quietly relieved to move stock that sat unsold for two decades. Others point out that they have handled the only known surviving copy of an 18th-century edition, and that a scanned file locked inside a private model is not a substitute for a book that still exists on a shelf.
There is no consumer setting to toggle here, which is part of what makes it worth reading about. This is the same pattern as Amazon-owned Twitch defaulting users into training Amazon’s AI on their streams, only with no opt-out at all, because the people whose work is being consumed — authors, publishers, the libraries that never got the copy — were never in the transaction. If you sell used books in bulk and would rather your stock not end up spineless in Nevada, the only real lever you have is who you sell to, and asking.
Sources: 404 Media, Ars Technica, The Next Web
