An AirTag hidden in a rare book led to Amazon's Las Vegas warehouse, where books are cut apart and scanned for AI training.
A bookseller who suspected that an anonymous order for around 1,000 titles was headed into an AI training pipeline decided to stop guessing. Working with 404 Media, the seller slipped an Apple AirTag into one volume and shipped the order through Biblio, a marketplace that keeps buyers anonymous. The tracker flew out of a California airport, landed outside Milwaukee, then sat for two weeks in a distribution warehouse near Kenosha Regional Airport before heading west by truck, pausing overnight at a travel centre near Grand Junction, Colorado. Its final stop was an Amazon warehouse called LAS8 in Las Vegas. More precisely, the north end of it, which houses a separate Amazon operation coded VGT3, where books arrive, lose their bindings to a cutter, get scanned, and are thrown out. 404Media found VGT3 staff describing the work on an Amazon employee forum, one of them writing that "all we do is scan books." The site's symbol, painted at the entrance, is a Tyrannosaurus rex holding an open book.
AirTag trail ended at the Amazon's LAS8 warehouse in North Las Vegas
Amazon has not disputed any of it. A spokesperson said the company buys books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services its customers use, and declined to answer why the books are cut, how many such facilities it runs worldwide, or how it views the backlash. LAS8 otherwise operates as a print-on-demand site, which is what made the destination confusing at first. The detail that matters more is what workers say they scan first: the barcode. Booksellers have long suspected AI firms are working methodically through the global ISBN list, and one seller noted that the huge orders never included the truly rare titles that predate ISBNs entirely. The pattern is not new either. Inc. found Amazon Seller Forum posts from September 2024 describing bursts of orders bound for the same location, one seller reporting 68 orders from a single buyer, another describing 48 orders landing around 4am, all University Press titles. Sellers thought it was a scam. An Amazon representative told them the orders were valid.
Why AI training data companies want books printed before 2022
Amazon builds its own Nova family of large language models and pitches them as frontier-class. Models like that need enormous volumes of human-written text, and the open internet has already been scraped clean. Print books hold text that never went online, arranged neatly, and anything printed before 2022 comes with a guarantee no webpage can offer: no chatbot wrote it. Train on too much synthetic text and quality degrades in a loop researchers call model collapse.
Rare booksellers in the UK and Ireland are refusing bulk AI orders
That explains the orders sellers keep flagging worldwide since roughly May. Large, randomly assorted, and placed by buyers who never haggle. Tomás Kenny of Kennys Bookshop in Galway said AI is "terrifying our industry" and plans to refuse orders he believes are bound for training data. The practice surfaced through the authors' lawsuit against Anthropic, which exposed Project Panama and ended in an approved $1.5 billion settlement. The judge treated the destruction of the original copy as a point in Anthropic's favour on fair use. Anthropic says none of its acquisition programmes buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books. The bookseller who planted the AirTag told 404 Media that books carry historical, intellectual and sentimental value alongside the sticker price. None of that survives the trip to Las Vegas. The buyers want the words, and the spine is the part that gets in the way.
