Amazon Acquires Rare Books for AI Training, Cuts Spines to Preserve Data
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Amazon is buying tons of rare books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them for AI training, according to 404 Media, which placed a tracking device in a rare book that ultimately arrived at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas.
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Ars TechnicaFor the past year or so, booksellers have suspected that AI firms are buying up huge lots of rare books, then destroying them after scanning them to train AI. But this was hard to prove until now, as 404 Media reports that an Airtag hidden in a rare book shows that at least one tech giant, in the race to advance its frontier models, is behind some of the bulk orders: Amazon.
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On Monday, 404 Media revealed that it had connected with a bookseller who agreed to plant an Airtag in a rare book that was part of a bulk order. That Airtag was then tracked to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning pages, 404 Media reported. Apparently tone-deaf to the escalating backlash over destructive book scanning, a logo on the door of that team’s warehouse, VGT3, showed a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book, 404 Media documented.
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TechCrunchThe facility, known as VGT3, identifies itself with a symbol of a dinosaur holding a book in its claws. Amazon told 404 Media in a statement that it “purchases books through commercial channels to improve the products and services customers use.”
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However, Amazon is developing what it considers frontier AI models, which require a massive amount of unique training data to stay competitive with leading firms like Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic. Right now, firms carefully guard their training data to avoid losing an edge. And training models on text from rare books that are difficult to find would seemingly offer an advantage for Amazon, especially since rivals like Anthropic and xAI have publicly stated that they are not training on rare or antique books.
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TechCrunchCompanies like Amazon need unfathomably large amounts of text to train their LLMs, which have already ingested what they can from the internet (and, in Anthropic’s case, illegally pirated books). Rare books, especially ones that are out of print or impossible to find on the internet, offer a new source of coveted training data.
3 details only one outlet reported
Independent claims that didn't surface elsewhere in our corpus. Treat as supplementary — not corroborated across outlets.
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01 The Verge On Friday, Amazon customers received an email alerting them to an update to the site’s terms and conditions. Most notably, it stated that disputes would now be resolved through arbitration and said users agree to a class action waiver.
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02 Ars Technica “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” Amazon’s statement said.
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03 Wired Twitch has updated its account settings to let streamers opt out of having their content used to help train the artificial intelligence models of Twitch’s parent company, Amazon.
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Sources (4)
- wired
- arstechnica
- verge
- techcrunch