Amazon is buying rare books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them for AI training

Amazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AI

404 Media placed a tracker inside a rare book and traced it to Amazon's VGT3 facility in Las Vegas. Amazon confirmed it buys books through commercial channels to improve its products. Rare, out-of-print texts are valuable for LLM training because they aren't available online and predate 2022, so they're guaranteed not to be AI-generated—helping avoid model collapse from training on synthetic data.

Why it matters: 404 Media's tracker-in-a-book investigation gives a concrete, ironic story with real industry stakes. Score stays at 78 because Amazon only confirmed commercial purchasing, not destruction — half the narrative is single-source from the investigation side.