Jeff Bezos founded Amazon to sell books—now the company is feeding them to AI and destroying them: report

Amazon, a company founded by Jeff Bezos as a book seller in July 1994, is now buying up used and rare books in order to destroy them and feed their contents to AI. A new report from 404 Media reveals that Amazon "is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process."

The outlet placed an Apple AirTag tracking device into a book that they believed would be bought for AI training and followed it all the way to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas. That warehouse, VGT3, takes in masses of books, cuts off their spines, and scans them, feeding that data to AI and removing the book from circulation.

404 Media spoke to an Amazon spokesperson, who said that "Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use." The books that are taken in and destroyed are not saved or repurposed as books but are used to feed AI models.

Amazon and other companies that are developing and training AI are ever on the hunt for material that is not already online. AI companies have already taken advantage of online content to feed their models and want not only information that is not already online but styles and forms of discourse and writing that are not online.

Booksellers have reported an uptick in bulk sales, much of which, they believe, is destined for an AI training center. A judge ruled that it was "fair use" for Anthropic, one of the AI companies engaged in massive book buys, to destroy the books and feed them to AI because the books were not being copied, which would violate copyright.

The book, once bought, is able to be treated in any way the owner wishes that does not violate a copyright. Authors attempted to sue over copyright infringement, but since the books were not being copied, just destroyed, the judge ruled against them and in favor of the AI companies.

However, the AI companies know how bad it looks to be in the business of consuming mass quantities of books just to destroy them and feed them to a machine. The lawsuit brought by authors revealed that in 2024, Anthropic said, "We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this." A public that may be open to AI is less open to outright destruction of human knowledge.

The irony is that Amazon was founded in 1994 to sell books. The company's primary function at the time Jeff Bezos began it in a Bellevue, Washington garage was to sell books online. Its expansion was gradual and eventually encompassed pretty much all aspects of commerce. The company went public in 1997 and they launched Amazon Web Services in 2006. The company currently operates AI assistant Alexa and is "powering new customer experiences with generative AI."