A tracker hidden inside a rare book just outed an Amazon-owned warehouse as a book-scanning site.
A bookseller slipped an AirTag into a rare book and let it ship out with a bulk order, then watched where it went. The tag crossed the country and stopped at a warehouse in Las Vegas owned by Amazon. Emanuel Maiberg reported the finding for 404 Media on Monday. It's a small, deliberate experiment - one tracker, one book - but it landed on a specific, verifiable location.
That specificity matters. Booksellers have spent the past year suspecting AI companies of buying up rare and out-of-print books, and until now that suspicion had nowhere concrete to point. A single AirTag doesn't prove what happens to a book once it reaches a warehouse, but it does confirm that at least one path from a used-book sale leads straight to an Amazon facility built for scanning.
One tracked book is an anecdote, not an audit. Whether it's representative of how AI companies actually source training data, or just one book that ended up at Amazon for an unrelated reason, is still an open question worth someone running a bigger experiment to answer.