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

Emmanuel Maiberg for 404 Media: A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination. That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands. […] We first learned that AI companies wanted to scan millions of books for training data because of a lawsuit from book authors against Anthropic, which revealed Anthropic’s “Project Panama.” The goal of the project was to acquire books from…