Amazon Is Shredding Books, Stripe Buys OpenRouter, and OpenAI Secures a 10-Gigawatt Campus

An Apple AirTag hidden inside a shipment of rare books tracked the package across the country to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, where workers told investigators they cut off book spines to speed up scanning—destroying the copies in the process. Amazon uses the scan data to train its Nova AI models. A spokesperson said the company buys books through commercial channels to improve its products. Book sellers suspect AI companies are trying to systematically scan every book by ISBN number, because printed texts often don't exist online and predate 2022, meaning they are free of AI-generated content. Amazon isn't alone: a lawsuit by book authors revealed Anthropic's "Project Panama," where the company bought books on marketplaces, cut off their spines, and digitized them. The judge in that case ruled that scanning qualified as fair use and didn't violate copyright, partly because the printed originals were destroyed and therefore not copied and resold. Used bookstores in England have reported bulk orders of thousands of books in a single day from Canadian companies. Book enthusiasts worry that rare books sold to collectors could be swept up in the process. Anthropic told the BBC that "none of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books," but other companies ma