💾AI Labs Pay Media Firms $350K to $1.8M for Old Work Records

Your old work records are now AI training currency

AI labs are paying media companies $350K to $1.8M for copies of their old work records, and nobody is pretending this is a small side market anymore. The industry now spends over $45B a year on private data, and companies are buying entire workflows and databases like it's a modern gold rush. If you ship software, this touches you more than you think. Your emails, Teams messages, and internal docs are exactly the unstructured data that's hardest to scrub and most valuable to train on. The default could soon be that corporations sell their workflow data to AI companies on an ongoing basis. Check your vendor contracts before someone else checks them for you. Handshake licenses professional documents across many fields and buys graduate students' papers and coursework. Mercor, founded in 2023, is the industry leader, and its three cofounders became billionaires at 22. Labs, enterprises, and robotics companies pay about $40 to $50 billion a year for data, and that's projected to approach AI compute spending soon. Worth watching: the sale of bankrupt Spirit Airlines' digital assets is on hold over privacy concerns. Critics say personal data could still leak out, and standards for data acquisition are lagging far behind the buying spree.