seventeenth August 2026 – Hyperlink Weblog
We Tracked a Cargo of Uncommon Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Coaching Facility. Glorious piece of reporting from 404 Media. For some time now there have been tales of e-book sellers receiving orders for big volumes of books from apparently price-insensitive nameless prospects, extensively suspected to be corporations seeking to scan them for AI coaching (see my earlier protection of Anthropic’s e-book scanning from June 2025.)
404 Media investigated with an AirTag!
In July, one bookseller informed me they obtained a really giant order of round 1,000 books on Biblio, one in all these marketplaces. The vendor agreed to place an Apple AirTag offered by 404 Media in one of many books included on this order so we might see the place the e-book was going. And by extension, which firm, AI or in any other case, was behind this large order.
The e-book ended up delivered to the VGT3 nook of the LAS8 Amazon facility within the north east of Las Vegas, the place the doorway carried this on-the-nose emblem of a dinosaur with a e-book!
Photograph credit score: 404 Media
On-line discussion board discussions between Amazon staff confirmed that VGT3 destructively scans giant volumes of books.
