Amazon Scans and Destroys Rare Books at Vegas AI Facility

404 Media placed an Apple AirTag in a rare book, packed it inside a roughly 1,000-book order listed on the Biblio marketplace, and followed the shipment across the country. It ended at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas that scans books for AI training data and destroys the physical copies.

The route, as 404 Media reports, ran from a California airport to Milwaukee Mitchell International, on to a Trifinity warehouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, then through Colorado Springs and a Grand Junction truck stop, before arriving at Amazon's LAS8 site at 5801 Nicco Way. Inside LAS8 sits a team called VGT3. Its logo is a Tyrannosaurus rex holding an open book.

"Working at VGT3 is nice all we do is scan books. It's so cool," an employee wrote on an online forum quoted by the outlet. Another described the split of work: some staff cut bindings, others scan barcodes on receive.

Asked about the operation, an Amazon spokesperson gave 404 Media a one-line response: "Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use." The company classes its Nova family of models as "frontier," meaning it considers them competitive with other cutting edge LLMs. Eleven of the AI researchers on our tracker shared the piece the same day.

The bookseller who agreed to plant the tracker was granted anonymity because they worried the disclosure would harm their business. "There's monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value," they said. 404 Media declined to name the titles in the shipment beyond calling them rare. The outlet notes it first learned AI companies wanted to scan millions of books through a lawsuit against Anthropic that revealed the company's "Project Panama."