The proof was the size of a coin. A bookseller, working with the investigative outlet 404 Media, slipped an Apple AirTag inside a rare book before sending it off as part of a bulk order that had raised suspicions. The tracker led investigators straight to a warehouse in Las Vegas — designated VGT3 — where an Amazon team is systematically removing book spines and feeding pages through high-speed scanners. On the door of that facility, staff had placed a logo of their own choosing: a Tyrannosaurus rex in the act of swallowing a book whole.

The revelation has confirmed fears that have been circulating among antiquarian booksellers for over a year. Large, impersonal bulk orders of rare and out-of-print titles had been arriving with growing frequency, and the books were never seen again. Amazon, which is building what it describes internally as frontier AI models — systems designed to compete directly with those produced by Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic — appears to have identified rare books as a valuable and relatively unguarded source of original training text. Rivals such as Anthropic and xAI have publicly stated they do not train on antique or rare volumes, which would, in theory, give Amazon a dataset that no competitor can easily replicate.

What makes the story particularly troubling to historians and book conservators is that non-destructive scanning technology already exists and is widely used. Destruction is a choice, not a necessity. Internal forum posts from VGT3 workers, surfaced by 404 Media, also revealed that earlier this year the facility ran completely out of books — a supply crisis serious enough that employees feared the warehouse might close.