Amazon has confirmed it purchases books through commercial channels to develop its products. This statement follows an investigation that reportedly traced a bulk order of rare books to a facility where workers are said to destroy and scan physical copies.
An investigation by 404 Media last week tracked an order of around 1,000 books from an anonymous buyer to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas, identified as VGT3. An Apple Airtag hidden in one of the books was used to trace the order.
Reports indicate that workers at the VGT3 site remove the spines of books before scanning their pages, which leaves the physical copies unusable. Employee posts cited by 404 Media also suggested that barcodes or ISBN numbers are scanned as part of this process.
Amazon did not specify which products the material was being used to develop, nor did it explicitly confirm that the scanned books were being used to train its AI models.