Key points
- Wired reports cold pitches offering media companies roughly $350K to $1.8M, and in one case up to $2M, for old documents, emails, Slack messages and tickets.
- Handshake, Micro1 and Mercor lead a young market; Micro1's CEO claims buyers spend $40 to $50 billion a year on data, which Wired could not verify.
- A sale of bankrupt Spirit Airlines' digital assets, including 500 million internal messages, is on hold after the flight attendants' union said it involved their private information.
- Anthropic told Wired it does not buy workflow data from live companies; OpenAI had not responded by publication.
Why it matters for marketers: Work files and internal messages now have a market price, so marketing teams and agencies should check what their contracts, vendors and shutdown plans allow before anyone fields an offer.
A Wired column describes a wave of unsolicited offers from data brokers asking media companies to sell archives of internal work: documents, emails, Slack messages, tickets and call transcripts. The pitches Wired received cited one-time fees from about $350K to $1.8M, with one going as high as $2 million. Handshake, Micro1 and Mercor are named as leaders, and newer firms such as Sunset and Tenkara are chasing the same material, including from startups that are winding down.
The brokers say they strip out personally identifying information before data reaches AI labs, and Mercor's CEO says that de-identification can be verified. Critics are not convinced. A lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center said unstructured text like emails and chat messages makes anonymizing harder, since employees may mention medical or family matters. The Spirit Airlines sale, now on hold after the flight attendants' union raised objections, is the most visible test case so far.
For marketers and content teams, the practical issue is ownership and consent. Campaign briefs, client emails, editorial tickets and call recordings may now carry resale value, and they often include client confidential material or staff and customer details. Agencies in particular hold data that belongs partly to their clients. Wired also notes that Anthropic says it does not buy workflow data from live companies, while OpenAI had no response.
Watch how the Spirit Airlines dispute resolves, and whether standards for this trade emerge. In the meantime, it is worth reviewing client contracts, data retention policies and any wind-down plans for language on selling or licensing internal records, and deciding in advance who has authority to say yes.
Sources
This brief is our own summary. Read the full reporting at the source.