Source time Edition date
IndustryWired AI
AI Companies Really, Really Want to Buy Your Work Files and Emails
AI公司非常非常想购买你的工作文件和电子邮件
Wired frames the AI training-data rush as a tradeoff: data brokers are sourcing internal corporate files and emails, and employees whose work is swept into those deals have no clear say.
Judgment
Corporate executives deciding whether to sell internal workflow data must weigh one-time offers of $350K to $1.8M against employee consent and leak risk, because de-identification does not settle who controls Slack messages and email.
Basis
Pitch emails quoted by Wired offer media companies $350K to $1.8M as a one-time fee for old work records, with another pitch raising it to $2M and claiming labs spend over $45B on private data. Handshake confirmed it licenses professional documents so labs can test and train models on real knowledge work; Mercor CEO Brendan Foody said Mercor strips PII and that de-identification can be verified; Micro1 CEO Ali Ansari estimated labs, enterprises, and robotics companies pay about $40 to $50 billion a year for data and said that could exceed a trillion dollars a year in two to four years, a figure Wired could not verify. Anthropic acknowledged a big data market but said it does not buy workflow from live companies like WIRED; OpenAI did not respond. In the Spirit Airlines bankruptcy sale, the corpus included 80,000 email accounts, 500 million internal messages, 20.6 million Microsoft SharePoint files, and a million time-card records; Google bid $10 million and Micro1 topped it by $2.5 million, and the sale is on hold.
- Email accounts80,000
- Internal messages500 million
- SharePoint files20.6 million
- Time-card records1 million
Unclear The source does not say whether employees can refuse or block a sale, how consent is obtained, or what legal basis lets a company sell Slack and email records.
Next Track whether the Spirit Airlines digital-asset sale resumes and whether the buyer is Google or Micro1; the source says the sale is on hold.