24/08/2026
An Apple AirTag just tracked a shipment of rare books to a secret Amazon AI facility in Las Vegas, where texts are cut apart, scanned, and destroyed to train AI models.
A groundbreaking investigation has exposed how tech giants are quietly acquiring physical books to train artificial intelligence models—by literally tearing them apart.
Suspecting that bulk purchases of rare and obscure books were destined for AI training, journalists at 404 Media teamed up with an independent bookseller to plant an Apple AirTag inside a volume shipped as part of an anonymous 1,000-book order. The tracking device traveled across multiple states, eventually terminating at a high-security Amazon facility in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Inside this warehouse, a specialized unit code-named VGT3 systematically processes incoming books by slicing off their bindings, scanning the pages for digital intake, and destroying the physical originals.
This aggressive scanning pipeline highlights the extreme lengths to which tech companies will go to secure high-quality training datasets, particularly pre-2022 literature that is completely free of AI-generated content. While independent booksellers watch their inventories get shredded, legal and ethical questions are mounting over the practice of turning physical, copy-protected books into digital training data before disposing of the evidence. Amazon defended the operation in a brief statement, claiming it purchases books through commercial channels to improve its products and services, but the revelation has ignited intense debate over the systematic destruction of physical human knowledge to fuel artificial systems.
source: Maiberg, E. (2026). We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility. 404 Media.
