The supply chain for AI training data just got a lot more visible — and a lot more controversial.
A rare bookseller suspicious that AI companies were bulk-buying books and destroying them planted an AirTag inside a shipment. According to a 404 Media investigation, that tag traveled to a warehouse in Las Vegas called VGT3, operated by Amazon. Workers there cut the spines off books to scan pages faster, then discard the originals. The team's logo, documented by 404 Media, shows a Tyrannosaurus rex devouring a book.
Amazon declined to confirm the books are used for AI training. Its statement said only that the company 'purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.' That's it. No mention of AI.
But the context is hard to ignore. Amazon is building what it considers frontier AI models — the kind that compete directly with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Those models need massive volumes of unique text. Rivals Anthropic and xAI have publicly stated they are not training on rare or antique books, which would give Amazon a potential data edge if it is.
The ISBN theory gets legs
404 Media also surfaced online forum discussions among VGT3 workers indicating they are trained to scan barcodes and ISBNs before scanning book pages. That practice, 404 Media reported, supports a theory booksellers have held for a while: AI companies are methodically working through ISBN lists to ensure every unique printed book gets scanned at least once.
Workers in those same forums reportedly said the facility nearly shut down earlier this year after running out of books to scan. The supply completely ran out at one point, they said. The facility is still operational.
What booksellers are actually losing
The books being targeted are not typically high-value first editions. They tend to be older works with lower monetary value — books never widely distributed, never translated into widely spoken languages, never popular enough to survive in large quantities. But the bookseller who planted the AirTag told 404 Media these works still carry 'historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value' that AI companies overlook. 'They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together,' the bookseller said, according to 404 Media.
One named critic, Burry, reportedly called the practice 'evil incarnate,' according to Ars Technica. Amazon workers, for their part, described the gig in forums as a 'nice' opportunity with flexible hours.
What this means for founders
If you are building products on top of any major AI model, the training data question is no longer abstract. The competitive moat these companies are digging is built partly on content that cannot be recreated — and that is being consumed in a one-way process. The knowledge gets locked inside proprietary weights, unavailable to competitors or researchers.
Free enterprise runs on property rights and voluntary exchange. Bulk-buying rare books through commercial channels is legal. But destroying irreplaceable works to feed a closed, proprietary system — while refusing to disclose what is being scanned — is the kind of opacity that should make any founder ask harder questions about the infrastructure they are building on.
