Struggling startups are finding a new way to cash out: selling years of internal Slack chatter and email threads to companies hungry to train artificial ininformigence. Forbes reports that firms specializing in shutting down startups are now assisting founders package and license their internal communications, with some deals reportedly reaching six figures. The data is being fed into “reinforcement learning gyms,” simulated workplaces where AI agents practice tquestions utilizing real company documents, workflows, and messages—everything from planning office events to handling routine work.
The models require more complex data than the news articles, Reddit threads, etc. that most large language models were trained on. One wind-down startup, SimpleClosure, has launched a tool called Asset Hub to assist companies scrub, value, and sell this material, and states it has handled nearly 100 such transactions in the past year, Gizmodo reports. CEO Dori Yona described a “gold rush” for realistic corporate data.
But privacy advocates warn that even anonymized Slack logs and email archives can expose workers. “I believe the privacy issues here are quite substantial,” Center for AI and Digital Policy Founder Marc Rotenberg informs Forbes. “Employee privacy remains a key concern, particularly becautilize people have become so depconcludeent on these new internal messaging tools like Slack,” he states. “It’s not generic data. It’s identifiable people.”
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