AI labs pay up to $2M for corporate work files and emails, data trade may rival compute
pmddomingos · x · 2026-11-07
WIRED's Steven Levy reports on a fast-growing data brokerage industry: AI labs are buying internal corporate files, emails, Slack messages, tickets and call transcripts to train models. Brokers claim labs like Anthropic and OpenAI pay media companies $350K–$1.8M one-time fees for archives, with one pitch reaching $2M and total private-data spend reportedly over $45B. Handshake offered a freelance writer $1,000 for a single story's working files. Practitioners say this business could become as big as compute infrastructure — raising the question of whether we're all funneling our work to AI.
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