Petteri Pyyny
18 Apr 2026 12:27
An essential part of business culture is that only a small portion of founded companies survive. The rest go bankrupt or their business just quietly shuts down.
Now these companies, whose business never really took off, have come up with a completely new trick to make a nice slice of money for their owners (or debtors).
Financial magazine Forbes reports (paywall) how defunct companies have started selling their former employees' email messages, Slack messages, and Teams messages as training material for AI companies' language models.
Apparently, AI companies are very interested in paying quite a nice sum of money for real, company-internal discussions. Presumably, this is because there is very little public material available from real working life that could be used for training language models.
According to Forbes, actors have already emerged in the market who help in shutting down a company - and at the same time also help sell the old company-internal messages to the highest-paying AI company. According to information, payments for company message collections range between $10,000 and $100,000, depending on the size of the message history and the number of employees.
Buyers promise to anonymize the senders' information in the messages, but privacy issues are still clear: the messages are very likely to contain personally identifiable information, even if names and contact details have been completely removed from them. It is very unlikely that the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) would allow similar trade in Europe.