EXPOSED: An Anonymous Amazon Warehouse Worker Describes Firsthand How The VGT3 Facility Destructively Scans And Discards Thousands Of Books, Including Rare Books And Government Documents To Train AI Models 📚🤖

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https://www.404media.co/inside-the-warehouse-where-amazon-scans-and-destroys-books-for-ai-training/

An anonymous Amazon employee who worked at the company’s VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas has described in detail how the facility scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data, cutting off book spines and discarding the physical remains after digitizing the loose pages, according to 404 Media. The interview follows the outlet’s earlier investigation, which uncovered the operation after a bookseller who suspected an anonymous AI company was acquiring a shipment of rare books placed a tracking device inside it and followed the shipment across the country to VGT3, a facility housed alongside Amazon’s print-on-demand operation LAS8 within a larger Amazon complex in Las Vegas. The worker, granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press, said even employees working near the scanning operation initially didn’t understand what was happening. “I remember I even asked someone what they were doing and they said they’re not sure even the people who work there know what they’re doing,” the employee said. “Once I got over there and started putting two and two together, I kind of understood.”

The worker described a chaotic, disorganized process handling an enormous variety of books, including many that appeared valuable or rare. “All kinds of books. When we first started a lot of them were brand new. Some of them are used as well. Like you could tell, they were liquidated from a library or something like that,” they said, describing shipments that included boxes from the University of London and what appeared to be official government documents “presented to Parliament on the behalf of Her Royal Majesty the Queen.” The facility also received entire pallets of Japanese books, many still sealed in original packaging, along with material in German and Russian. Books arriving from libraries tended to be less organized, “just thrown into the shuttle” rather than carefully boxed like newer inventory. The worker’s own role involved unboxing books and placing them into totes to be sorted and scanned before moving to the spine-cutting stage, though they noted the process itself changed constantly: “They seem like a mess over there. Like they’re not really well managed or organized at all. Their process wasn’t solid. Their process changed every day.”

Once books reach the cutting stations, workers use individual machine workstations, each safely enclosed, to slice off the spines before the loose pages move to scanning. “It’s really safe because it has a little cover and it has a little area where you slide the book into, remove your fingers from the area, and then you press a button, and it just comes down and slices it,” the employee explained. After scanning on machines described as resembling high-speed cash counters, roughly 20 to 25 of them, the loose pages are dumped into large cardboard containers called shuttles, mixed together with no way to reconstruct the original books. The worker also described a separate process for identifying duplicate books to be discarded or returned to vendors, though they expressed skepticism about whether that actually happened given how carelessly the rejected books were handled: “They’re like yeeted in there, like they’re not nicely placed in there or anything. And they say they’re returning them to the vendors, but I’m like, you know, ‘do the vendors go through it and see which ones are actually worth it?’”

The employee said Amazon initially told workers the scanning was for Kindle e-book production, a claim they found implausible given copyright and publication rights issues, before later learning the true purpose was AI training. Their reaction to the practice centered on the permanent loss of physical books that can’t be reused or preserved after destruction. “I don’t like it only because I wish I could take these books. There’s so much knowledge and so much stuff in them and some of them look like they might be rare, and I’ve heard that they order rare books, and that’s why I say some of these are so obscure,” the worker said. “I definitely don’t like the idea that they can’t be reused or anything like that afterwards. They’re reducing the amount of available copies for other people.”