From WIRED · Steven Levy · · 3m
AI companies are quietly buying your work
Data brokers are offering millions for employee emails, documents and messages to train AI models, raising privacy and labor concerns.
In brief
Data brokers are offering millions for employee emails, documents and messages to train AI models, raising privacy and labor concerns. Data acquisition startups are brokering the sale of company workflows to AI labs for millions of dollars, but privacy experts warn anonymization may not protect workers whose emails…
The pitch arrives in your inbox
AI labs including Anthropic and OpenAI are paying media companies like Wired three hundred fifty thousand to one point eight million dollars for copies of old work records including documents, emails and Slack messages for…
“AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI are paying media companies such as Wired $350K to $1.8M as a one time fee for a copy of their old work records”
The stakes keep rising
Another pitch raised the offer to two million dollars and added call transcripts to the list of desired information.
“Public data is exhausted, and the labs are spending over $45B on private data to build better models”
A bigger business than expected
The data acquisition industry is booming quietly, buying workflows from sizable companies. Practitioners say it could have as much impact on workers and society as the data centers dominating news coverage.
Handshake targets individual workers
The company Handshake offered a freelance writer one thousand dollars for work on a single story. Handshake licenses professional documents across many fields so labs can test how models handle real knowledge work, including journalism.
“We license professional documents across a lot of fields so the labs can test and train how models handle real knowledge work”
Startups help companies wind down
Companies like Sunset are helping startups wind down by scrubbing and anonymizing their data, stripping out company people and identifying details, then brokering deals with AI labs.
Industry leaders in a gold rush
Handshake, Micro1 and Mercor are snapping up databases as if in a modern gold rush. Mercor, founded in twenty twenty-three, is the industry leader. Last year its three cofounders became billionaires at twenty two.
Mercor CEO on explosive growth
Mercor CEO Brendan Foody says the market is poised to explode as AI labs seek dramatically more data.The company started as an AI recruiter but learned labs were frustrated by data quality.
Privacy concerns dismissed as solved
Foody says when businesses stream data to Mercor, the company strips out personal identifying information, or PII.De-identification can be verified.Data acquisition practitioners say technology has solved the privacy issues of buying all that information.
Micro1 predicts trillion-dollar market
Micro1 CEO Ali Ansari, who founded the company in twenty twenty-two, says labs, enterprises and robotics companies pay about forty to fifty billion dollars a year for data.
“In the next two to four years, this is going to be over a trillion dollars a year”
Spirit Airlines sale exposes the risks
Bankrupt Spirit Airlines put digital assets up for sale including eighty thousand email accounts, five hundred million internal messages, twenty point six million Microsoft Sharepoint files and a million time-card records.
Flight attendants union blocks the deal
The flight attendants union charged that the Spirit Airlines sale involved their private information.The sale is now on hold.This raises questions about the entire practice of selling off human workflow without explicit worker consent.
Anonymization may not protect privacy
Mayu Tobin-Miyaji, general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says anonymizing cannot fully get rid of privacy issues.Emails and Teams messages contain unstructured data that is harder to root out.
“It's not clear that anonymizing can fully get rid of privacy issues”
Workers enlisted to replace themselves
The most troubling aspect is that workers are enlisted, not always with explicit consent, to contribute to training AI models designed to replace or automate their own work.
“This is really only data that became valuable in the age of AI in order to train models to replace jobs”
The future default: selling your workflow
Micro1's Ansari says selling workflow data to AI companies will become more common than ads as a revenue line item for companies.
“I think it's going to become more common than ads as a revenue line item for companies”
The short version
Data acquisition startups are brokering the sale of company workflows to AI labs for millions of dollars, but privacy experts warn anonymization may not protect workers whose emails and messages could reveal personal details.
