Unions and Rival AI Bidder Challenge Google's $10M Spirit Airlines Data Deal

Google's $10 million bid for the deidentified business records of bankrupt Spirit Airlines is awaiting court approval. The package includes approximately 100 million emails, 80,000 email accounts, over 17 million OneDrive items, about 20.6 million SharePoint items, and around 500 million Microsoft Teams items, along with decades of payroll, training, and recruiting files.

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA has objected, arguing that the deidentification standard prioritizes consumer privacy over confidential employee records. The machinists' union and TWU Local 570 support this objection, as do the pilots' unions ALPA and APA, citing concerns over safety and training data. Software vendor Springshot has requested that its intellectual property be excluded, while AI training-data startup micro1 has submitted a competing $12.5 million bid with proposed employee-data protections. Mercor was named the alternate bidder at $7.5 million after the August 14 auction.

The sale hearing has been adjourned multiple times, with the next hearing scheduled for October 14. Neither Google nor Spirit Airlines has publicly detailed how the data would be used beyond model training. The Economist notes that GDPR purpose-limitation rules would likely prevent similar reuse of operational data if Spirit were a European company, highlighting a regulatory gap for European buyers or startups looking to productize employee communications.

The case underscores how internal communications from defunct companies are becoming valuable AI training assets, with frontier labs and data-labeling startups competing for these resources.