Amazon accused of scanning physical books for AI development

Amazon is facing scrutiny following reports that the company purchases large quantities of physical books to scan for product development. An investigation by 404 Media used an Apple AirTag to track a bulk order of approximately 1,000 books to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas, known as VGT3.

Reports indicate that employees at the facility allegedly remove the spines of books before scanning the pages, rendering the physical copies unusable. While Amazon confirmed to City AM that it purchases books through commercial channels to “help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” the company did not explicitly confirm if the material is being used to train its Nova AI models.

The practice highlights an industry-wide scramble for high-quality, human-written training data. As the internet becomes saturated with AI-generated content, older and out-of-print books are increasingly valuable because they provide reliable data created before the recent explosion of synthetic text. This follows similar reported practices by other AI developers, such as Anthropic.