Google has agreed to pay $10 million for a massive collection of internal Spirit Airlines data, part of the bankrupt carrier’s ongoing asset auctions, according to Bloomberg Law. The tech giant will train its AI on everythnig from consumer flight records to private employee chat logs.
Tom’s Hardware reports that after Spirit Airlines declared bankruptcy and ceased operations in May, it began selling off its assets in bankruptcy court to address roughly $8.1 billion in debt. Multiple tech companies have been bidding on the company’s vast trove of consumer data to feed into its AI models, and Google has won the bidding.
Google’s $10 million offer beat Mercor.io’s $7.5 million bid by $2.5 million. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York has named Mercor.io Corp. as a backup buyer should the Google deal not go through.
Google has said it intends to use the data to train its AI large language models. According to court records, the purchase includes 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 7.2 billion records tracking competitors’ flights, and 7.5 billion passenger transaction records dating back to 2008.
It also covers more than 175,000 employee records from as far back as 1986. Beyond these figures, Google will gain access to information on revenue, aircraft operations, employee productivity, audits and fraud investigations, marketing campaigns, human resources files, project management records, and pricing curve data.
The scale of the deal raises questions for anyone who has interacted with the airline as a customer, employee, contractor, or investor, particularly given ongoing concerns about AI and data privacy. However, court records specify that Google will not receive personal data.
This excludes the 97.5 million passenger profiles the airline maintained and the 50.2 million customer records tied to the Free Spirit loyalty program. The court stated that all data transferred to Google will be “rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt.”
The acquisition reflects a broader push by AI companies to find unique, specialized datasets after having already scraped much of the publicly available internet. Some companies have also faced scrutiny over reportedly acquiring large numbers of books to train AI systems.
Spirit Airlines’ internal records are considered valuable because they are not readily available online and represent decades of operational data specific to the airline industry. That kind of information could allow Google to develop AI models tailored to aviation and offer related services to other airlines.
AI’s insatiable desire for fresh training materials means Americans will face more and more challenges to their privacy as everything we say and do online becomes grist for the training mill. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Tom’s Hardware here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.