Tracking devices in book shipments reportedly led to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas emblazoned with a book-hungry dinosaur.
Taija PerryCook
Published Sept. 1, 2026
Image courtesy of Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Google Earth.
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- In August 2026, investigative outlet 404 Media (and later The Wall Street Journal) used location trackers to follow large shipments of books, some of which were rare, to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas. 404 Media claimed Amazon was cutting off book spines to more efficiently scan their contents for artificial intelligence data training purposes — destroying the books in the process.
- The facility, called LAS8, was home to the VGT3 operation. Publicly available Google Maps images show the entrance of the facility emblazoned with the image of a dinosaur baring its jaws, holding a book in its claws.
- According to online posts predating 404 Media’s reporting by more than a year, people claiming to be Amazon employees at the site described “cutting and scanning books for up to 12 hours at a time.”
- 404 Media also pointed to authentic 2024 messages from booksellers in Amazon vendor support channels raising concerns about unusually large orders for books coming from Las Vegas.
- In an email to Snopes, an Amazon spokesperson said: “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.”
- It remains unclear whether Amazon specifically seeks out rare books — or whether some of the books it acquires happen to be rare. It’s also unclear, as of this writing, whether the books are used purely for training AI or for some other purpose.
In August 2026, a claim circulated online that tech giant Amazon was acquiring large quantities of books, some of them rare, and cutting off the spines to more efficiently scan the pages for artificial intelligence training data — destroying the books in the process.
The rumor emerged amid news that AI companies such as Anthropic were scanning — and destroying — millions of booksto train their AI models.
Social media users across multipleplatforms claimed Amazon was similarly destroying books, and dozens of Snopes readers contacted us seeking answers.
“Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process,” one Instagram userposted(archived) on Aug. 18, gaining more than 2.2 million views, as of this writing.
The rumor stemmed from an Aug. 17, 2026,storyby digital investigative outlet 404 Media. Reporter Emanuel Maiberg collaborated with a bookseller who suspected a large order of books was linked to Amazon’s book scanning project, planting an Apple AirTag in the shipment that eventually appeared at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas called LAS8.
Maiberg pointed to posts from booksellers raising concerns about unusually large shipments as well as online forum posts by people claiming to be Amazon employees writing in about the work at VGT3, the name for the operation, which Snopes tracked down and verified below.
In a follow-upstoryAug. 26, Maiberg reportedly spoke with an employee who worked at Amazon’s VGT3 warehouse. The employee, who was quoted anonymously, reportedly described how machines cut the spines off books before 20 to 25 scanners flipped through the loose pages “like machines that count cash.”
Asked for a response to 404 Media’s reporting, an Amazon spokesperson wrote in an email to Snopes: “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.”
We also reached out to Maiberg regarding whether Amazon specifically sought “rare” books and whether he came across any evidence that Amazon was scanning books for e-books, but did not immediately hear back. We will update this story if we do.
Although we verified the location of the VGT3 operation and identified the online messages referred to in 404 Media’s reporting, and Amazon confirmed it purchases books for the purposes of developing its products, we left this claim unrated because it remains undetermined whether Amazon specifically seeks out “rare” books and whether it uses the books exclusively for AI training data, as well as whether the online posts truly came from Amazon employees who worked at the Las Vegas facility.
Evidence of Amazon’s book-scanning operation
In July 2026, a bookseller reportedly told Maiberg they received an order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, an online bookselling marketplace. In cooperation with 404 Media they placed an AirTag in the shipment, which eventually turned up at an Amazon warehouse at 5801 Nicco Way, Las Vegas.
The entrance to the facility, where a window bears a large illustration of a dinosaur with its jaws bared holding an open book, is currently publicly viewable on Google Maps. A reporter for a local Las Vegas news outlet also captured another angle of the facility’s entrance.
Google Street View imagery from February 2026 shows the same building entrance — though it did not have the dinosaur emblem at that time.
We asked Amazon whether there were similar operations in other cities or countries, which the spokesperson did not address in their response.
The Wall Street Journal also reportedly spoke with a bookseller in the Pacific Northwest who similarly followed a shipment using location trackers inside the book covers. Reporter Melissa Korn wrote:
The other book went first to a warehouse in Kenosha, Wis., then to a spot in northern Las Vegas at an intersection with at least two Amazon facilities. It eventually moved to a position in Mexicali, Mexico. While the seller couldn’t determine the exact address, a Google map of the location shows a sprawling recycled-paper manufacturing facility.
404 Media also pointed to messages in Amazon support channels in which booksellers raised concerns about large orders. “This is the first order I’ve seen like this in over 10 years of selling here,” one booksellerwrotein September 2024, reporting that the buyer’s address matched an “Amazon Fulfillment Center” in Las Vegas.
An Amazon support representative responded that they were investigating the concerns, before eventually confirming the orders were legitimate.
What have purported Amazon employees said?
Both <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/ais-need-for-content-has-put-rare-book-dealers-in-a-bind-1ac5a053#:~:text=In%20a%20Reddit%20forum%20for%20Amazon%20employees%2C%20a%20post%20from%20about%20a%20year%20ago%20described%20the%20work%20done%20at%20VGT3.%20%E2%80%9CAll%20we%20do%20is%20scan%20books%2C%E2%80%9D%20the%20post%20read.%20%E2%80%9CSome%20are%20assigned%20to%20cut%20books%2C%20and%20others%20go%20to%20receive%20where%20they%20get%20books%20and%20scan%20the%20bar%20codes.%E2%80%9D%C2%A0″ rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>The Wall Street Journal and 404 Media referenced posts on online forums by purported Amazon employees from more than a year prior to the 2026 stories in which they described work at the Las Vegas facility, reportedly involving cutting and scanning books for up to 12 hours at a time.
“Some are assigned to cut books, and others go to receive where they get books and scan the bar codes,” one comment reportedly read.
Snopes verified that this post was real (archived), as were other posts dating back to at least July 2025 (archived, archived), although we were unable to verify they were truly made by Amazon employees.
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In its Aug. 26 story, 404 Media reported that when asked what it looked like when the book spines were cut off, the employee said:
It’s a machine people operate. Each of these machines is just like a little workstation, and there’ll be one person at each of these stations. 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. And then you remove the books after the blade is gone.
The employee reportedly described how after the books were cut, they were put into large containers, saying, “They’re just piled in there. It’s also right next to where they start cutting the spines, and so I think right after that, that’s where it’s going [the trash].”
Because we do not rely on anonymous sources for our fact-checking, we do not consider this account to be primary evidence.
How did 404 Media define ‘rare’ books?
According to 404 Media, the books in the shipment it tracked were rare, meaning “there are not many copies of them in circulation.” Though many people online appeared to believe Amazon and other AI companies were specifically seeking out rare books, perhaps with the intention of gatekeeping or monetizing their contents by converting them into exclusive digital copies, we did not find evidence of this, as of this writing. Maiberg wrote:
That employees are scanning the barcodes or ISBNs on books — a unique serial number given to every published book — before scanning their content gives further credence to another theory put forth by booksellers: AI companies are trying to methodically scan every printed book in the world by working through the list of ISBNs. One bookseller told me they suspected this was the case because the very large orders they were getting never included very rare books that do not have ISBNs.
In other words, Amazon may be indiscriminately acquiring printed books, which may include some that have few copies in circulation.
This would align with the internal Anthropic documents we previously reported on, which stated that the goal of its book-scanning project, “Project Panama,” was to “scan and destroy ‘all the books in the world.'” In anemailto a bookseller, project director Tom Turvey said “less common books are a great place to start.” It’s unclear whether “less common” refers to a book’s actual market rarity or the number of circulating copies.
It’s unclear, as of this writing, whether Amazon was specifically seeking out rare or collectable books in any capacity. We reached out to Maiberg seeking clarification. We also asked the Amazon spokesperson about how it chooses the books the company purchases, and they did not address this question in their response.
The anonymous employee who reportedly spoke with 404 Media said the shipments contained “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. We were even getting boxes of stuff from London. There were a lot of books from the University of London. There was even like, I don’t know what you would call them, but it was like kind of stapled together papers that said that they were presented to Parliament on the behalf of Her Royal Majesty the Queen. So they were like government documents. I don’t know if they’re public. Probably they’re public, but it was just interesting that we found all that in there.
According to The Wall Street Journal, several “rare-book sellers” reported receiving these mass orders, with one seller reportedly claiming his sales more than doubled in one year. It’s unclear what percentage of the total amount of books Amazon has acquired has come from rare-book sellers as opposed to standard book marketplaces.
Unclear whether Amazon uses books for AI training
Amazon did not respond to our question regarding whether the book scans were used to train AI, converting the physical books into e-books or some other purpose.
“They didn’t tell us it was for AI, I personally thought we were scanning them to make them into e-books, that was depressing to realize,” a Reddit user who claimed to have once worked at VGT3posted in August 2026.
As we previously reported, AI companies such as Anthropic have sought totrain their modelson books as high-quality data to prevent “model collapse,” which happens when AI trains on its own content. This feedback loop degrades the quality of AI output and results inAI slop.
Sources
Buyer’s Address Is an Amazon Fulfillment Center?https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/597eeb76-fe27-44c9-940b-ccb50d07697c?postId=597eeb76-fe27-44c9-940b-ccb50d07697c. Accessed 26 Aug. 2026.
Huge Multiple Orders to Amazon FC North Las Vegas SCAM or LEGIT ?? https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/b06e22fd-1926-4616-af16-d6b94d1fb31c. Accessed 26 Aug. 2026.
Korn, Melissa. ‘Rare-Book Sales Are Booming. They’re Getting Sliced Up and Fed to AI.’The Wall Street Journal, 22 Aug. 2026, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ais-need-for-content-has-put-rare-book-dealers-in-a-bind-1ac5a053.
New item…
Maiberg, Emanuel. ‘Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books for AI Training’. 404 Media, 26 Aug. 2026, https://www.404media.co/inside-the-warehouse-where-amazon-scans-and-destroys-books-for-ai-training/.
Maiberg, Emanuel. ‘We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility’.404 Media, 17 Aug. 2026, https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/.
New item…
Sebelius, Steve. ‘Book Destruction Draws Ire’.Channel 13 Las Vegas News KTNV, 21 Aug. 2026, https://www.ktnv.com/news/book-destruction-draws-ire.
‘Street View · Google Maps’.Street View · Google Maps, https://www.google.com/maps/@36.2692418,-115.0481019,3a,15y,255.94h,85t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sb6h2wW2vHSY4JWL2LfDHWA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D4.9951339737582146%26panoid%3Db6h2wW2vHSY4JWL2LfDHWA%26yaw%3D255.94142691651928!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDgxOS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D. Accessed 26 Aug. 2026.
Taija PerryCook is a Seattle-based journalist who previously worked for the PNW news site Crosscut and the Jordan Times in Amman.
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