We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
摘要
Simon Willison 转发并评论了 404 Media 的一篇调查报道。报道称，近期有书商收到匿名大客户的大批量购书订单（如一次约 1000 本），外界怀疑这些订单来自为 AI 训练扫描图书的公司。404 Media 让一位书商在订单中的一本书里放入苹果 AirTag 追踪去向，结果发现该书被送到拉斯维加斯东北部亚马逊 LAS8 设施的 VGT3 区域，该入口处有恐龙衔书的标志。亚马逊员工在论坛讨论中确认，VGT3 会破坏性地扫描大量图书。
荐读理由
这条实锤了亚马逊在拉斯维加斯仓库用 AirTag 追踪到的整批书做破坏性扫描喂 AI，印证了匿名大批量购书背后的真实去向，让你对巨头训练数据来源的判断有了硬证据。
原文
Simon Willison’s Weblog
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17th August 2026 - Link Blog
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility. Excellent piece of reporting from 404 Media. For a while now there have been stories of book dealers receiving orders for large volumes of books from apparently price-insensitive anonymous customers, widely suspected to be companies looking to scan them for AI training (see my previous coverage of Anthropic's book scanning from June 2025.)
404 Media investigated with an AirTag!
In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order.
The book ended up delivered to the VGT3 corner of the LAS8 Amazon facility in the north east of Las Vegas, where the entrance carried this on-the-nose logo of a dinosaur with a book!
Photo credit: 404 Media
Online forum discussions between Amazon workers confirmed that VGT3 destructively scans large volumes of books.
Posted 17th August 2026 at 3:21 pm
This is a link post by Simon Willison, posted on 17th August 2026.
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