A rare book containing a hidden AirTag was tracked to Amazon’s VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas, where 404 Media reported that a team tore books from their spines and scanned their pages. The book was supplied by a bookseller as part of a bulk order after booksellers had spent roughly a year suspecting that AI companies were acquiring large quantities of rare books and destroying them after digitization. 404 Media connected the tracked book to an Amazon AI training facility, providing evidence tying Amazon to at least one such bulk purchase. Amazon did not comment directly on the findings or say whether the scanned books were used for AI training. The company said it buys books through commercial channels “to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.” Amazon is developing frontier AI models, which require large volumes of distinct training data to compete with companies including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Text from rare books could offer valuable training material because the works may be difficult to obtain elsewhere. Anthropic and xAI have publicly said they do not train their models on rare or antique books. A logo documented on the VGT3 team’s warehouse door depicted a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book.

Amazon is acquiring large quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI training data, and subsequently destroying them. An investigation tracked a rare book to an Amazon AI training facility, revealing the company's book buying operation.

Amazon has begun construction on a massive AI data center in Gilroy, California, using a 45-year-old legal provision to bypass community voting. Local residents were not given an opportunity to comment on the project before its initiation.

Amazon is investing in a natural-gas-burning power plant in Texas, which could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States. This investment is part of a larger data center project, despite the company's commitments to climate initiatives.

Amazon is investigating engineers who publicly criticized the rapid expansion of AI data centers and called for stronger government regulation. Five employees testified at Seattle City Council meetings regarding a year-long moratorium on new large-scale data center construction.

The Trump administration halted all foreign use of Anthropic's AI models following discussions between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and U.S. officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Researchers at Amazon used prompts to extract information from Anthropic's Fable 5 model that could potentially aid cyberattacks.

Amazon employees are mocking the company's AI tools on Slack, referring to the output as "slop." Despite Jeff Bezos' belief in AI's potential to drive productivity gains, employees joke about the ineffective motivation to use these tools.

A federal judge granted Amazon a temporary order blocking Perplexity's Comet AI browser from accessing its site. Amazon's lawsuit claims Perplexity concealed its AI agents to scrape the website without permission.

Amazon's ecommerce division will require senior engineers to approve AI-assisted changes following a series of outages linked to these tools. The company identified a trend of incidents with a high blast radius associated with novel GenAI usage.

Amazon held an engineering meeting in response to recent outages related to its AI services. The meeting aimed to address and resolve the issues affecting the performance of these services.