Amazon Is Shredding Rare Books in the Name of AI Training
Hope you didn’t want to read those.
Credit: Alexander Spatari/Getty Images
Decades after becoming the internet’s first major bookseller, Amazon is now buying rare books to scan and destroy them. It joins the likes of Google and Anthropic, which have reportedly been buying up physical books in bulk from rare book shops to scan them for more training data. These books are wrecked in the process, 404 Media reports.
As AI developers hunt for ever-more useful data to feed their frontier language models, they’ve allegedly turned to classic books. Because these were printed before 2022, they’re guaranteed not to contain any AI-generated content. They’re also unlikely to have been used in training before, representing a new fountain of knowledge and patterns to recognize in building the next generation of AI.
But scanning the books takes time, so AI companies are doing what tech does best: moving fast and breaking things. Amazon, for example, cuts off the books’ bindings to make it easier to access the pages inside, then discards the pages after scanning.
The logo for the Amazon facility where this happens is VGT3, featuring a dinosaur ripping at a printed book.
Credit: 404 Media
Although Anthropic and Google have been accused of the same, the alleged evidence that they have done so is currently buried in courtroom paperwork. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has reportedly told SpaceX’s xAI division to scan rare books without destroying them.
Some AI companies may have been at this for over a year already, with strange orders at bookshops appearing in 2025. In-depth investigations are what it will take to find out for certain what those orders were for. 404 Media tracked a book sale to Amazon’s shredding and scanning facility, proving it is now in the practice of destroying printed media.
Because the books in question are often old copies with few duplicates in circulation, this practice could completely remove historical printed works from the world. That represents lost knowledge and history—not to mention that gorgeous smell old books have.
“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” an Amazon spokesperson told 404 Media in a statement.
It has yet to comment on the shredding accusations.
