Amazon Destroys Rare Books for AI Training, Raising Copyright and Heritage Concerns
Amazon reportedly purchases rare books in bulk, scans their contents for AI training data, and destroys the physical copies, raising concerns about copyright infringement and the permanent loss of literary heritage and unique materials.
What happened
An investigative report by 404 Media found that Amazon purchases rare books in bulk through commercial channels, scans their contents to extract data, and then destroys the physical copies.
A book seller tracked one shipment of approximately 1,000 books using an AirTag, which traveled from California to Milwaukee, then to Grand Junction, Colorado, and finally to Las Vegas, Nevada, where it arrived at Amazon's LAS8 facility.
At the facility's VGT3 section, books are received and processed by cutting the spine and feeding pages into scanning machines to convert them into data for AI training, rather than producing human-readable PDFs.
Reported impact
The destruction of rare and hard-to-find books raises concerns about permanent loss of literary heritage and unique cultural materials.
The practice contributes to broader debates about copyright infringement and the use of copyrighted works to train AI models without explicit authorization from authors or publishers.
Index analysis
Amazon confirmed to 404 Media that it purchases books through commercial channels to develop and improve products and services, but did not publicly specify which AI models use the scanned data.
The practice mirrors similar activities by Anthropic, which internal documents revealed was conducting destructive book scanning through an internal program called 'Project Panama' to supply data to its AI models.
Governance controls
Court rulings in cases against Anthropic and Meta determined that companies do not violate copyright law when training AI using copyrighted works so long as they purchase the physical books used.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.