Amazon has been buying large quantities of rare books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them for AI training, according to 404 Media's tracking investigation. The outlet placed a tracking device in a rare book that ultimately arrived at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas.
The Las Vegas warehouse, known as VGT3, identifies itself with a symbol of a dinosaur holding a book in its claws. Amazon told 404 Media that it "purchases books through commercial channels to improve the products and services customers use."
Rare books that are out of print or impossible to find on the internet offer a new source of coveted training data for large language models. These texts are especially valuable since nothing published before 2022 could have been written by an LLM, and training on AI-generated text risks "model collapse," where output quality degrades.
The scale of these purchases has drawn attention from booksellers. An independent bookseller in Ireland received an order for 5,000 books that they suspected was for AI training.
Another bookseller told 404 Media that these large orders never include rare books that lack an ISBN.
