We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison ● Covered by 7 sources
A tracked rare book from a 1,000-book order ended up at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas. It backs up the long-suspected story that some big book buys are really for AI scanning.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
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404 Media followed a very unusual book order the old-fashioned way: by hiding an AirTag in one of the books. The shipment came from a large July purchase of around 1,000 books on Biblio, the marketplace where one seller noticed an anonymous customer who did not seem to care much about price.
That detail matters because booksellers have been seeing this pattern for a while. Large orders, little bargaining, no clear identity. The suspicion has been that the books are being bought not to sit on shelves, but to be scanned for AI training.
The tracked book did not disappear into some mystery warehouse. It turned up at the VGT3 corner of the LAS8 Amazon facility in the northeast of Las Vegas. The entrance, in a bit of accidental branding poetry, has a dinosaur logo holding a book.
Forum posts from Amazon workers added more weight to the trail. According to those discussions, VGT3 destructively scans large volumes of books. So the AirTag did not just find a destination. It pointed straight at the industrial machinery behind a quiet corner of the AI supply chain.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the part of AI that gets dressed up as innovation and then behaves like a very boring supply-chain problem. People keep pretending the training data arrives by magic; it usually arrives in boxes. And when the boxes are full of rare books, the “ethics” debate starts looking less abstract and a lot more like warehouse logistics.
Read more about this at: Simon Willison’s Weblog