An AirTag hidden inside a rare book has been tracked to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas, providing the first concrete evidence linking a major tech company to the bulk purchasing and destruction of rare books for AI model training, according to an investigation by 404 Media published on Monday2,4.
404 Media reported that it connected with a bookseller who agreed to plant an AirTag in a rare book included in a bulk order. The tracker led to a facility in Las Vegas that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning the pages. A logo on the door of the team's warehouse, designated VGT3, depicted a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book.
Booksellers had suspected for roughly a year that AI firms were buying large lots of rare books and destroying them after scanning, but the practice had been difficult to prove until the AirTag tracking. Amazon declined to comment on 404 Media's findings, providing only a statement that did not mention AI training specifically.
The investigation drew significant attention across technical communities. The 404 Media article accumulated 78 points and 87 comments on Hacker News. A separate aggregation of the story via The Decoder collected 30 points3.
The report follows recent coverage of Twitch defaulting creators into Amazon's generative AI training pipeline, with opt-out required for those who object ctx. ANALYSIS Together, the two episodes illustrate Amazon sourcing AI training data through channels — rare book lots and creator livestreams — where content owners face limited visibility or control over how their material is used.
The physical destruction of rare books to extract training data represents a qualitatively different data-acquisition method from web scraping or licensing deals, because the source material is finite and, in many cases, irreplaceable. The documented supply chain — linking bulk purchases to a named facility and team — converts what had been bookseller suspicion into concrete evidence.