An AirTag in a rare book led 404 Media to an Amazon facility that destroys books to train Nova

404 Media reported on 17 August 2026 that it hid an Apple AirTag in a book inside a 1,000-book bulk order placed through the Biblio marketplace, which allows anonymous buyers. The tag travelled from California through Wisconsin and Colorado to an Amazon complex in Las Vegas — warehouse LAS8 — feeding a unit marked VGT3 whose doors carry a logo of a dinosaur destroying a book. Workers describe the job as slicing bindings off and scanning all day, destroying the physical copies; Amazon uses the scans as training data for its Nova models.

What it means Anyone selling physical or licensed text should read the anonymous bulk order as an acquisition channel: the copy leaves your catalogue as a sale and arrives as training data, and nothing in the transaction told you which it was.