Google won a bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' internal business data, agreeing to pay $10 million for roughly 100 million emails and 500 million Teams chats to train its AI models. The airline's passenger and loyalty records are excluded from the deal.
Read the full story: Google Paid $10M for Spirit Airlines' Emails and Chats →
Transcript
A dead airline just became a data vendor. Spirit Airlines went through bankruptcy, and the court auctioned off its digital filing cabinet. Google won it, for ten million dollars. What's in the box: roughly a hundred million emails, about five hundred million Microsoft Teams chats, spreadsheets, HR files, audits, financial databases. What's not in the box matters too. The ninety seven and a half million passenger profiles and the fifty million loyalty records are carved out. Google says it will use this to improve its products and its AI models, and that the data will be deidentified. Here's the thing about deidentifying free text. The names are inside the messages. Nobody who typed those emails was ever asked. A federal judge still has to sign off. And if Google walks, an AI hiring startup was already bidding seven and a half million.