$10 Million for a Defunct Airline's Internal Chat Logs: Google Will Train AI on Them, After Outbidding Mercor

Bankruptcy court filings show Google won the internal business data of the shut-down Spirit Airlines for $10 million, to train AI and improve its products — roughly 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, plus spreadsheets, calendars, HR and financial documents. Bidding started at $5 million, Mercor went to $7.5 million, and Google took it at $10 million; Mercor was named backup buyer. Google says a third party strips personally identifiable information before handoff, and passenger profiles and loyalty records are excluded. The sale still needs approval at an August 19 hearing.

What Is Being Sold Is a Record of How a Company Worked

The inventory is not a customer list. It is the full residue of a company's day-to-day operation: roughly 100 million emails and 500 million Teams chats, along with spreadsheets, calendars, marketing materials, HR files, project management documents, financial databases, audits, presentations and billions of flight pricing records. The value lies precisely in what is not on the open web — real multi-party coordination, approval threads, reversals mid-decision and the tidying up afterward, which is exactly the training material that customer service, finance and scheduling agents lack. Spirit filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations on May 2, and is auctioning assets to pay down roughly $8.1 billion in debt. The bidding is in the filings: Google opened at $5 million, Mercor overbid at $7.5 million, and Google took it at $10 million. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York named Mercor the backup buyer should the deal fall through. Mercor connects professionals to AI training projects — a different business from Google's, chasing the same material.

The De-identification Promise, and a Gavel That Has Not Fallen

Google says a third party will clear all personally identifiable information and customer records before handoff, and the court filing defines de-identified data as data that cannot be associated with, reasonably used to infer information about, or otherwise linked to a particular consumer. Explicitly excluded are the 97.5 million passenger profiles Spirit retained and the 50.2 million Free Spirit loyalty records. Worth stating plainly: the deal is not yet final. The approval hearing is set for August 19, and until the court rules, nothing is settled.

A Market Taking Shape

The number to remember is not the $10 million but what it opens up. The internal communications of failed companies — Slack archives, Jira tickets, email threads, drive files — are becoming a biddable asset class, with AI companies as the buyers. For enterprises, "the company is gone but its data still trades" stops being hypothetical. For teams building agents, this kind of corpus genuinely fills the gap public data leaves. Both are true at once, which is why it is worth watching.

via: Forbes, Tom's Hardware, Quartz