AI Companies Really, Really Want to Buy Your Work Files and Emails

Lately a new kind of pitch has found its way into my inbox. “Not sure if you've heard,” writes someone named Nick, “but AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI are paying media companies such as Wired $350K to $1.8M as a one time fee for a copy of their old work records (documents, emails, slack messages, tickets, etc.) for training better models.”

Another email with a similar pitch (adding call transcripts to the list of desired information) raised the stakes to a possible $2 million. “Public data is exhausted, and the labs are spending over $45B on private data to build better models,” writes someone named Cora.

While I was aware that AI companies are buying expert data from various sources, there hasn’t been that much attention paid to it. But once I looked into it, I discovered that this business is way bigger than I suspected—and according to its practitioners, it could have as much impact on workers and society as the data centers that are dominating the news these days.

The companies that contacted me are part of an industry boom in data acquisition that’s been quietly buying the workflows of sizable companies and is still so hungry that it’s bleeding into our inboxes. A freelance writer recently wrote about her experience with a company called Handshake, which offered her $1,000 for her work on a single story. (She didn’t sell.) A representative from Handshake confirmed the offer to me: “We license professional documents across a lot of fields so the labs can test and train how models handle real knowledge work,” he said. “Journalism is one of those fields.” Handshake tells me that a big part of its business is buying graduate students’ papers and coursework.

“Pretty much everybody’s trying to get into the data space now because there’s so much demand,” he says. “If you look at the YC startups, about half of them are data companies.” (Actually, it’s more—in the most recent YC batch, 40 of the 65 launched companies are classified as data startups.)