Journalists slipped a tracker into a rare book that was part of an order of around 1,000 titles. The device traced the book to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas. Employees at the facility say they receive large consignments of books and cut the bindings off so that the contents can be scanned more quickly.
Amazon has confirmed that the company buys books through commercial channels in order to develop and improve its products and services.
Books are of particular interest to AI developers because much of their content is not available online. Older books, in addition, do not yet contain AI-generated text, which matters if developers want to avoid so-called "model collapse".
Booksellers had noticed a sharp jump in sales in recent months and had suspected that AI companies could be behind the large and highly varied orders. Until now, however, it had remained unclear who was actually snapping the books up.
