IT corporations used to strike deals with libraries and digitize archives out in the open. Now they disguise themselves as regular buyers, quietly buy up old editions in bulk, and secretly send them through the shredder. Some of the destroyed books exist in only a single surviving copy.
An AirTag hidden inside a shipment helped expose the scheme.
Here's the story of how AI gets trained on paper books.
A used-book dealer's investigation
Booksellers in the US, Europe, and Australia noticed a strange pattern. Unknown buyers were snapping up thousands of books at full price, and the choice of titles made no logical sense. One British bookseller told the Guardian he shipped 6,000 volumes to warehouses near Heathrow — the recipient names differed, but the postal code was the same every time.
To track down the actual buyer, the seller slipped an AirTag into one of the books. The package crossed the entire US and ended up at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas.
A destruction pipeline
The tracker led to an Amazon division called VGT3.
🦖 The unit's unofficial logo is a dinosaur with bared teeth, tearing a book apart.
According to employees, their job is to take in batches of printed books and slice off the bindings. The loose pages get run through a scanner at maximum speed. Once digitized, the physical paper is simply thrown away. Amazon confirmed it buys books to "improve its services" but declined to comment on the destruction process.
Why this is legal
In June 2025, a US court ruled that digitizing legally purchased books counts as "fair use." The court's logic: if the paper original is destroyed in the process, the world still ends up with exactly one copy of the edition — it's just digital now. So no copyright violation.
And Amazon isn't the only one exploiting this loophole.
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, got there first. In the company's declassified documents, the process was called Project Panama, with the goal stated bluntly — "destructively scan all the books in the world." The project was kept under tight wraps.
Now IT companies are trying to save face. Elon Musk recently claimed his team scans rare books carefully and "without cutting the spines" — but stayed quiet on what happens to ordinary editions.
The AirTag only exposed one address. This spring and summer, booksellers logged dozens of similar orders headed to different warehouses. Which means the process is running at scale, and right now, new batches of books are already going under the blade.