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AI Labs Are Buying Bankrupt Companies' Data. Some of It Isn't Theirs to Sell.

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State of AI is a trade publication covering artificial intelligence inside the enterprise for the engineering, security, data and brand leaders who own AI decisions inside real companies. We report on the ideas, people and developments shaping what the AI labs are shipping and what it costs, and what that does to engineering, security, budgets and brand inside a real company, with a particular focus on perspectives from the executives, operators and subject matter experts doing the work firsthand. Our readership is global and includes professionals at Fortune 500 companies and leading organizations across enterprise technology. Our goal is to give practitioners a useful place to learn from their peers and give experts a credible platform to contribute their experience to important industry conversations.

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We regularly speak with senior executives, operators, practitioners, researchers and other subject matter experts whose experience is relevant to the topics we cover. Our editorial team proactively identifies potential contributors based on their professional expertise, experience and perspective. You do not need to be a customer of, partner to, or otherwise affiliated with any company to participate. Interviews are designed to surface useful firsthand perspectives rather than promote a product or company. For participants, they provide an opportunity to contribute to the conversation around their field, share lessons from their work, and build a published body of thought leadership around the subjects they know best. There is no fee to participate.

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State of AI is published by Outlever, which produces it as one of its own media properties rather than on behalf of an outside sponsor. The articles and interviews are produced by the State of AI editorial team. Experts are invited because their perspectives are relevant to our coverage, not because they have paid to appear. An interview invitation from State of AI should therefore be understood as an invitation to contribute expertise to an editorial trade publication — not as a sales solicitation or paid placement.

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Your interview will be published on State of AI, where it becomes part of our ongoing coverage of artificial intelligence inside the enterprise and can continue to be discovered and referenced after publication. Our audience includes the engineering, security, data and brand leaders who own AI decisions inside real companies at organizations around the world, including professionals at Fortune 500 companies and other leading enterprises. We also make interviews easy to extend through professional networks. Contributors receive a shareable article link and professionally designed quote-card asset that can be used on LinkedIn, and stories may receive additional amplification through the publication, contributor networks and relevant professional communities. For many contributors, the value is not simply appearing in one article. It is having their expertise captured in a credible editorial format that can be shared with colleagues, customers, peers and their broader professional network.

Google bid $10 million for Spirit Airlines’ internal data to train AI, and the airline’s vendors and former employees say some of it was never Spirit’s to sell.

ByState of AI Editorial

Oct 15, 2026

Every company now produces AI training data, whether it means to or not. The AI industry calls it operational exhaust: the Slack threads, Jira tickets, email chains and code history that pile up from ordinary work. Labs are now paying for it.

Until this summer, that market mostly meant small startups selling their leftovers for five or six figures. Then Spirit Airlines put its archive up for auction, and the objections came from the people and companies whose data was in it.

The $10 million test case

Google won the auction for Spirit Airlines' internal data on August 14 with a $10 million bid, beating AI data firm Mercor's $7.5 million, Reuters reported. Spirit stopped flying in May. Google says it will use the data to improve its products and AI models.

The estate's filing lists about 100 million emails across 80,000 accounts, 500 million Teams messages, 516 code repositories and 175,658 employee records reaching back to 1986, per the August 14 schedule. Passenger profiles and loyalty records were left out.

Most large companies have an archive like this one. Spirit's auction gives the first public price for one, and a bankruptcy court is now weighing whether it can be sold.

The fight is over whose data it is

One of Spirit's software vendors was among the first to object.

Springshot ran operations software for Spirit up to the airline's last flight. It learned about the auction from the news, Ars Technica reported. In an August 21 filing, it argued that the sale's broad categories, like "workflow and process data," lump Spirit's data together with vendor intellectual property stored in Spirit's systems, Bloomberg Law reported. Its 2022 contract says Springshot owns data its software generates, the filing says.

Spirit's former employees raised a related complaint. Spirit's flight attendants' union said customer data got a privacy screen while worker records did not. Pilots' unions joined, and more than 120 lawmakers led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren asked Google to keep employee data out, ch-aviation reported.

The court's privacy ombudsman recommended approval on October 5 after passenger and booking data were cut, but her report did not assess risks to employees or third parties, The Next Web reported. The hearing has slipped to November 6, according to a case tracker. Google says all personal information will be excluded or scrubbed by an independent third party.

Your vendors are the ones closing

AI companies drew $355.9 billion of the $412.7 billion invested in US startups in the first half of 2026, but were just 14.4% of the companies that closed through wind-down firm SimpleClosure, its H1 report says. Most of the rest are pre-AI software companies running out of money.

Enterprise teams have put years of support tickets, sales notes, contracts and integration logs into vendors like these. SimpleClosure has brokered more than 150 data and code sales since April, and they now appear in 47% of its shutdowns, MIT Technology Review reported. SpaceX's AI unit has informally discussed buying customer and operational data from failing startups, Bloomberg reported in September.

As State of AI reported in May, SaaS vendors are restricting how customers' own agents can reach the data stored in their platforms. When one of those vendors dies, the same data can be packaged for a lab.

Your archive has a price, too

The same market puts a value on your own company's exhaust. Labs build "reinforcement-learning gyms" from real archives so agents can practice actual work. Surge AI, which builds them, looks for archives full of disagreements and hard judgment calls, MIT Technology Review reported.

Those are also the conversations most companies would least want a buyer to read. Buyers pay more for archives whose systems link together, so tickets connect to code and emails connect to people. Spirit's sale agreement requires the scrubbed data to keep those links, according to the filing.

Data leaders who set Slack, Teams and email to keep everything have mostly worried about legal discovery. If the company is sold or shuts down, that archive also goes on the asset list.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is State of AI?

State of AI is a trade publication covering artificial intelligence inside the enterprise for the engineering, security, data and brand leaders who own AI decisions inside real companies.

We report on the ideas, people and developments shaping what the AI labs are shipping and what it costs, and what that does to engineering, security, budgets and brand inside a real company, with a particular focus on perspectives from the executives, operators and subject matter experts doing the work firsthand.

Our readership is global and includes professionals at Fortune 500 companies and leading organizations across enterprise technology. Our goal is to give practitioners a useful place to learn from their peers and give experts a credible platform to contribute their experience to important industry conversations.

Who do you interview, and why was I invited?

We regularly speak with senior executives, operators, practitioners, researchers and other subject matter experts whose experience is relevant to the topics we cover.

Our editorial team proactively identifies potential contributors based on their professional expertise, experience and perspective. You do not need to be a customer of, partner to, or otherwise affiliated with any company to participate.

Interviews are designed to surface useful firsthand perspectives rather than promote a product or company. For participants, they provide an opportunity to contribute to the conversation around their field, share lessons from their work, and build a published body of thought leadership around the subjects they know best.

There is no fee to participate.

Who publishes State of AI?

State of AI is published by Outlever, which produces it as one of its own media properties rather than on behalf of an outside sponsor.

The articles and interviews are produced by the State of AI editorial team. Experts are invited because their perspectives are relevant to our coverage, not because they have paid to appear.

An interview invitation from State of AI should therefore be understood as an invitation to contribute expertise to an editorial trade publication — not as a sales solicitation or paid placement.

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Where will my interview appear, and who will see it?

Your interview will be published on State of AI, where it becomes part of our ongoing coverage of artificial intelligence inside the enterprise and can continue to be discovered and referenced after publication.

Our audience includes the engineering, security, data and brand leaders who own AI decisions inside real companies at organizations around the world, including professionals at Fortune 500 companies and other leading enterprises.

We also make interviews easy to extend through professional networks. Contributors receive a shareable article link and professionally designed quote-card asset that can be used on LinkedIn, and stories may receive additional amplification through the publication, contributor networks and relevant professional communities.

For many contributors, the value is not simply appearing in one article. It is having their expertise captured in a credible editorial format that can be shared with colleagues, customers, peers and their broader professional network.

The $10 million test case

The fight is over whose data it is

Your vendors are the ones closing

Your archive has a price, too

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