# AI labs want your company's old emails and Slack messages, and brokers are paying up to $2M for them

> Data brokers like Mercor, Micro1 and Handshake are buying real workplace records to train models. A bankrupt airline's 500 million messages are now in a fight with its flight attendants.

- URL: https://devisdead.ai/news/ai-labs-want-your-company-s-old-emails-and-slack-messages-and-brokers-are-paying
- Published: 2026-11-08T23:25:29Z
- Author: DevIsDead Newsroom
- Section: AI vs Humans
- Tags: training data, privacy, mercor, labor
- Originally reported by WIRED (https://www.wired.com/story/ai-companies-really-really-want-to-buy-your-work-files-and-emails/).

The next AI gold rush isn't chips. It's your inbox. Steven Levy looks at the booming trade in workplace data for [WIRED](https://www.wired.com/story/ai-companies-really-really-want-to-buy-your-work-files-and-emails/), starting with pitches that landed in his own email offering media companies $350,000 to $2 million for old documents, emails, Slack messages and tickets to train AI.

## Who's buying

A wave of data brokers sells this material to AI labs. The leaders, Mercor, Micro1 and Handshake, are only a few years old; Mercor's three co-founders became billionaires at 22. Handshake offered one freelance writer $1,000 for a single story, and says it buys graduate students' papers and coursework. Newer startups pitch shutting-down companies on selling their records, with the data scrubbed and anonymized first.

Mercor CEO Brendan Foody says labs found that experts simulating work missed the messiness of a real business, and that the industry's appetite for data is as endless as its appetite for compute. Micro1 CEO Ali Ansari claims buyers spend $40 to $50 billion a year on data today, a figure Levy couldn't verify, and predicts over $1 trillion a year within two to four years. In the latest Y Combinator batch, 40 of 65 launched companies were data startups.

Anthropic told WIRED that it doesn't buy workflow data from operating companies like WIRED; OpenAI hadn't responded.

## The Spirit Airlines fight

The bankruptcy sale of Spirit Airlines' digital assets shows the stakes: half a billion internal messages, 80,000 mailboxes, more than 20 million SharePoint files and a million time-card entries. Google seemed to win with $10 million before Micro1 bid $2.5 million more. The sale is now on hold after the flight attendants' union argued it includes their private information.

## The catch

Brokers say stripping personal details solves privacy. EPIC's Mayu Tobin-Miyaji doubts it: unstructured messages can contain doctor's appointments and family issues that are hard to scrub. And the uncomfortable core, as the union's president put it, is that this data only became valuable because it can train models meant to replace the people who wrote it.

If your employer goes under, your work chat may end up as training data. Worth remembering next time you vent in a DM.

**[Scoreboard](/scoreboard) update:** AI +1. Workers' old emails and chats become the training data for the AI built to do their jobs.

Stay undead.