AI Companies Really, Really Want to Buy Your Work Files and Emails
With public training data nearly exhausted, the AI industry is fueling a massive, lightly regulated market for private corporate records and real-world workflows, raising major privacy and labor concerns.
Reported by Wired ·
What happened
Data brokerage startups like Mercor, Micro1, and Handshake are offering hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to buy internal corporate emails, Slack messages, and workflow documents to train AI models. While brokers claim to strip personally identifiable information, privacy advocates and labor unions warn that unstructured work records cannot be fully anonymized and are being used to automate human jobs without employee consent.
Who it’s about
- Mercor
- Micro1
- Handshake
- Anthropic