Hidden AirTag in a Rare Book Exposed Amazon's Warehouse
An investigation by 404 Media tracked a book from an order of 1,000 titles to Amazon's VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas, where workers cut the spine and scan pages for AI training.
An investigation by 404 Media tracked a book from an order of 1,000 titles to Amazon's VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas, where workers cut the spine and scan pages for AI training.
The investigative outlet 404 Media placed an Apple AirTag inside a rare book within an order of 1,000 titles and tracked it to Amazon's VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas, where books are systematically destroyed to be scanned for AI model training. Workers at the warehouse, part of the larger LAS8 complex, confirmed that their sole task is cutting the spines of books and feeding them into a scanner.
"All we do is scan books," said one employee who spoke with 404 Media. According to worker testimonies, the books undergo a destructive process: first, the spine is cut off, and then the pages are fed directly into an industrial scanner. The VGT3 logo, depicting a dinosaur holding a book as if about to tear it apart, further confirms the facility's purpose.
The investigation began in July when 404 Media journalists asked a bookseller to allow them to place an AirTag inside a shipment of 1,000 books. Such large orders have become common in the age of artificial intelligence, and many suspect that the surge in book sales is not due to increased reading but rather the need for data to train AI models.
The order was placed through Biblia, an online platform that describes itself as the "largest independent book marketplace in the world." An independent bookstore in Ireland, Kennys Bookshop, received an order for 5,000 books that they suspected was intended for AI training. "Some was high-quality non-fiction, like A History of Connemara, and the next thing might be The Eddie Hobbs Guide to your SSIA," said Tomás Kenny of Kennys Bookshop.
Workers at the warehouse are required to scan the ISBN barcode of each book, lending credibility to the theory that AI companies are working from a list of every book ever published. One bookseller revealed to 404 Media that such large orders "never" include rare books without an ISBN.
Earlier this year, court filings revealed Anthropic's "Project Panama," launched in 2024. An internal document clearly defines its purpose: "Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world." A judge allowed Anthropic to use books for AI training, but the company was fined $1.5 billion for holding 7 million pirated books in a central library.
In a 2025 lawsuit against Meta, it was revealed that the company had pirated nearly 82TB of books. Mass book scanning is not new: Google launched Google Books in 2005 by digitizing out-of-copyright titles, but the books were returned after scanning, unlike the destructive process at VGT3.
The reason for this approach is likely cost. After companies like Meta and Anthropic were caught with libraries of pirated books, they now have to purchase them. Buying thousands of used copies from platforms like Biblia is significantly cheaper than paying full price for digital versions, if they exist at all.
