AI Labs Are Quietly Buying Corporate Emails and Work Files
Source: WIRED Backchannel
OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies are systematically purchasing internal corporate data—emails, Slack messages, documents, call transcripts—from media outlets and other large enterprises for $350K to $2M per dataset, treating proprietary workplace information as a new revenue stream. This marks a shift from scraping public internet data to directly monetizing the private knowledge work that employees create daily, creating a perverse incentive where companies can profit by selling their workers' communications and intellectual output without consent. The scale is already substantial ($45B+ spent on private data acquisition) and practitioners believe this private data market will rival data center investment in shaping AI capability and labor dynamics.