Amazon has reportedly bought large quantities of printed books, including rare and foreign-language titles, for scanning into AI training data. A 404 Media investigation tracked a rare book with a tracking device to Amazon’s VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Employees at the site reportedly said shipments of books are received there, their bindings are cut off to speed scanning, and the physical copies are destroyed. A bookseller involved in the tracked shipment said rare books can carry historical, intellectual, sentimental, and monetary value beyond their text. The Internet Archive, founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, digitizes books while retaining their physical bindings. Its scanning centers use operators known as scribe operators to capture books one page at a time. The organization says it does not destroy books by cutting off their bindings and instead adapts machines and software for nondestructive digitization. The Internet Archive contrasts its process with Google Books, launched in 2004, which it says used industrial-scale destructive scanning to increase processing speed.

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.

Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players contributed to approximately 30 billion environmental scans to earn in-game rewards. Niantic Spatial has utilized these scans to train a camera-based navigation model for military drones and robots, which a U.S. defense contractor is preparing to implement.