AI Labs Are Buying Your Work Files and Emails
Original: AI Companies Really, Really Want to Buy Your Work Files and Emails
Why This Matters
Private workforce data may shape AI model quality as much as compute investments do.
Data brokers are pitching companies up to $2M for internal documents, emails, Slack messages, and call transcripts to train AI models. Mercor, Handshake, and Micro1 lead a booming private-data acquisition market as public training data runs dry.
A quiet industry has emerged around selling corporate workflows to AI labs—and it's growing fast. Emails pitching companies like WIRED offer $350K to $1.8M for old work records including documents, emails, Slack messages, and tickets, with some brokers claiming labs are spending over $45 billion collectively on private data.
The players include Mercor (founded 2023, whose three co-founders became billionaires at 22), Handshake, and Micro1. Handshake confirmed it licenses professional documents across fields—including journalism and graduate student coursework—so labs can train models on real knowledge work. A startup called Sunset even helps wound-down companies sell their anonymized operational data to brokers who then flip it to labs.
Mercor CEO Brendan Foody says the market is set to accelerate as labs push beyond exhausted public datasets. The company started as an AI recruiting firm before pivoting when it noticed labs struggling with data quality.
Anthropologic acknowledged the market exists but said it doesn't buy workflow data from active companies like WIRED. OpenAI did not respond before publication. Whether the data is properly anonymized—and what workers whose communications get sold actually know about it—remains an open question the article flags but that brokers have clear financial incentive to downplay.