When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works .
Employees who spoke to 404 Media said they spend their time at the facility (named VGT3) cutting the spines off of books and feeding them into a scanner. VGT3 is reportedly part of another, larger facility in Las Vegas called LAS8. Its purpose, according to the employees who spoke to 404 media, is solely to cut the spines off books and scan them. "All we do is scan books," one employee told the outlet.
If there was any doubt about the purpose of the facility, a logo with VGT3 shows a dinosaur holding a book, looking like it's about to rip it up and take a bite. At the very least, the dinosaur isn't reading the book. You can see that image captured on 404's website above.
The investigation started in July, when 404 asked a bookseller if the outlet could place an Apple AirTag in a book inside a 1,000-book shipment. A shipment this large is unusual, though they've reportedly become increasingly common in the AI era. Book sales are up , and many suspect that isn't due to a rise in readership, but for training frontier AI models. The order was submitted through Biblio, an online marketplace that claims to be the "largest independent book marketplace in the world."
Often, these large orders contain a scattershot of different books. An independent bookseller in Ireland , for example, received an order for 5,000 books that they suspected was for training AI. “Some was high-quality non-fiction, like A History of Connemara, and the next thing might be The Eddie Hobbs Guide to your SSIA,” Tomás Kenny of Kennys Bookshop said at the time. 404 Media says that employees at VGT3 are required to scan the ISBN (barcode) of each book, lending credibility to the theory that AI companies are working through a list of every book that has ever been published.
AI companies are reportedly shredding millions of books after using them to train AI models — tech giants outsource to middlemen to secretly buy up books for training material
Independent bookstores in Europe receive suspicious orders for thousands of books, prompting fears they'll be destroyed to train AI
Meta pauses mandatory AI training program that tracked employee keystrokes after internal data leak
Or, at least, every book with an ISBN. A bookseller told 404 Media that these large orders "never" include rare books that don't have an ISBN.
Earlier this year, court filings revealed Anthropic's 'Project Panama,' which kicked off in 2024. Documents as part of those filings make the project's purpose clear: "Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world," said an internal planning document. A judge ruled that Anthropic was allowed to use books to train its AI models. However, it was fined $1.5 billion for keeping 7 million pirated books in a central library. In a 2025 lawsuit against Meta, it was revealed that it had pirated nearly 82TB of books .
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/secret-tracking-device-placed-in-rare-book-ends-up-in-amazon-processing-facility-destroying-books-to-train-ai-models-is-all-the-vegas-warehouse-does#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
- Google reportedly taps AMD to design next-generation TPU — hybrid AI ASIC could integrate on-package CPU cores for reinforcement learning
- The PC age began 45 years ago with the breakthrough Intel 8088 processor — 8-bit bus fueled 45 years of x86 dominance
- NVIDIA Alpamayo 2 Super, the Frontier Open Model for Robotaxis and Autonomous Vehicles, Now Available for Commercial Use
- PC Partner warns of rising GPU prices and budget card shortages — analyst suggests makers are hiking prices beyond memory costs
- How to choose a new motherboard without overpaying — scoping out the features you need, and what you might never use as component costs soar
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.