August 2026
Bishop and his co-host were discussing a report that Amazon is cutting apart and scanning books at a facility, which most coverage read as AI training data. Bishop says he is less convinced than most, and offers this as the lesson from years of covering the company: the obvious explanation is often not the real one, and Amazon does not mind the confusion. His co-host pushes back that the evidence does point at AI.
Transcript
So initially, he was confused because this center is primarily known as like a print-on-demand place. So, like, why would you have rare books at a print-on-demand, you know, Kindle direct publishing kind of place? But he realized from employee forums that there's a separate facility inside this building on the north end where they scan books, they cut them apart first, and then they scan them. And now, Amazon didn't deny this in its statements, but Amazon also was not forthcoming about the reasons that they're scanning these books. The assumption based on all sorts of clues, including the fact that some of the employees scan the ISBN codes, the barcodes, it seems like they're logging these books in some ways. And it fits the pattern of an AI company trying to systematically work through every known book that they can. And so the assumption is that it's training some kind of AI model. Of course, Amazon is partnered closely with Anthropic, which has gotten in hot water over this practice. That said, one of the safe harbors in the ruling that the judge came out with in that case was: hey, if you're destroying the book in the process of scanning it, it's actually okay because you're not going to reuse it. Sort of this weird legal technicality, which is kind of perverse, especially to book lovers. At any rate, fascinating story, and I loved it for the reporting technique that was put into it.
So, what do you think is really going on?
I think it's probably AI. I'm less convinced of that than most other people. And I will tell you, I don't think 404 media definitively proved that it's for AI. And yet, their headline and their lead and a lot of their language, it felt like some of the reporters' hedging in the story was lost and it just got translated, oh yeah, this is an AI book scanning operation. Having covered Amazon for as long as we have, I think one of the lessons that we've taken away is it may be for something completely different than anybody ever expects that is not obvious. It's just Amazon does weird stuff and they're willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. I think it could be something completely different. What do you think?
The evidence certainly would indicate AI purposes and training. So I would see why they would maybe make that leap. But yeah, you're right. We don't know. I think the end result is we're not 100% sure here, but certainly interesting the lengths that these companies are going to just to capture the planet's data.
Yes. Yes. This whole technique, I did some research, and there's a precedent here in a Seattle nonprofit called the Basel Action Network. They started planting GPS trackers long before AirTags in old printers and monitors back in 2014. And they were tracing where e-waste actually goes. And they found that so much of this was basically exported and not truly recycled in the ways that the companies that took them in promised. And so it was kind of some investigative watchdog reporting by this nonprofit in a much similar way, but they had to like team up with MIT on cellular trackers that needed a data plan. And it wasn't exactly the AirTag era.
And it's getting easier and easier to do this sort of tracking. I mean, you think about even like the watermarking technology within AI that you're now able to track, you know, AI systems. Yeah, I think it's fascinating how companies are tracking data now.