AI labs want your old work emails, and data brokers are selling them (opens the source in a new tab)
- Steven Levy reports brokers pitching companies, Wired included, one-off fees for old documents, emails, Slack messages and tickets to train AI. Leaders Mercor, Micro1 and Handshake say they strip out personal details first.
- Bankrupt Spirit Airlines' records, including 500 million internal messages, drew rival bids from Google and Micro1; the sale is on hold after the flight attendants' union objected.
- Privacy lawyers say messy emails and chats are hard to fully anonymise, and the data trains AI meant to automate the very work that produced it.
- 500M
- Spirit internal messages in the data sale
Why it matters Workplace messages are becoming an asset on someone else's balance sheet, often without the staff who wrote them being asked. Once sold and trained on, that data cannot be recalled.
Other side Buyers say de-identification can be verified, and that real working data makes AI more useful at work. A company winding down may fairly see its records as value it paid to create.