Amazon has been purchasing large volumes of rare and out-of-print books, scanning them to train its AI models, and then destroying the physical copies. An investigation by 404 Media, published on August 17, 2026, used an AirTag to track a shipment of approximately 1,000 books from a California bookseller to Amazon’s VGT3 facility in Las Vegas, where workers slice off bindings to speed up digitization. The company specifically targets books published before 2022 because they contain text written entirely by humans. A US federal judge has ruled that purchasing books, scanning them, and destroying the originals qualifies as fair use in certain AI training contexts.
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