Overview
- Google emerged as the winning bidder in a bankruptcy auction for Spirit’s enterprise archive, offering $10 million and outbidding AI data firm Mercor, which was named the backup buyer.
- Court filings list the assets as roughly 100 million employee emails, about 500 million Microsoft Teams records, millions of files, roughly 30 million lines of code and extensive flight, booking and transaction logs.
- The sale requires a third party to scrub personally identifiable information before transfer, with Google covering the cost and the agreement preserving referential links across records to keep the archive useful for training multi-step AI agents.
- The deal explicitly excludes passenger profiles, loyalty-account records and attorney‑client privileged material, and the proposed transfer is set for review at a hearing before the U.S. Bankruptcy Court on August 19.
- Observers say the transaction shows a growing market for failed companies’ internal records as AI training fuel, raising questions about the quality of anonymization, oversight of de‑identification and privacy risks for former employees.