When a startup dies, its Slack archives and email logs used to just disappear. Now they're worth real money.
SimpleClosure, which helps wind down failed startups, has processed nearly 100 deals in the past year selling internal company data to AI developers. Payouts range from $10,000 to $100,000, according to Forbes.
The data feeds into what the industry calls "reinforcement learning gyms." Think simulated offices where AI agents practice actual work tasks, like organizing team events or managing project workflows.
This market is bigger than you'd think. The Information reported that Anthropic discussed spending up to $1 billion on RL gyms. SimpleClosure launched Asset Hub this week to help companies figure out what they can sell, price it, and strip out personally identifiable information. CEO Dori Yona calls it a "gold rush" for real-world workplace data.
Nobody asked the employees whose conversations are being sold. Meta's recent move to log employees' keystrokes and screen activity for AI training highlights how employee data is being commodified on a massive scale. Marc Rotenberg, who runs the Center for AI and Digital Policy, told Forbes that Slack messages and internal emails contain identifiable personal information, not generic data. His organization has pushed the FTC to increase oversight of AI companies.
Under U.S. bankruptcy law, companies own communications created on their systems. Trustees can sell those assets to pay creditors. But privacy regulations like CCPA and GDPR still apply, which means the data usually needs to be scrubbed before it changes hands. Legal ownership of the file doesn't automatically give you the right to use everything in it.
So what happens if a former employee recognizes their own messages in a training dataset? Can they contest it? Nobody seems to have a clear answer yet.
That should worry anyone who's ever vented about their boss in a private Slack channel or shared personal details over company email. If you're working at a startup right now, it might be worth checking your employment agreement. Atlassian recently enabled default data collection to train AI models across its platforms, suggesting that such policies are becoming increasingly common even among established tech firms. Few companies update their privacy policies to cover the possibility of selling internal data post-collapse. Most employees sign NDAs and data policies assuming the company will outlive their messages.
That assumption is dead.