Fast Company: Shuttered startups are selling old Slack chats and emails to AI companies. “According to a report by Forbes, defunct companies are selling their digital footprints to AI companies as training data—and making real money from it. Shanna Johnson, the CEO of now-defunct software company Cielo24, told the publication that she was able to sell every Slack message, internal email, and […]

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"When Shanna Johnson was winding down cielo24, the transcription and captioning company she ran as CEO, she discovered an unexpected asset: its operational exhaust—the digital leftovers that pile up across years of work and collaboration.

To close the company out, she worked with SimpleClosure, a startup that specializes in helping companies wind down. SimpleClosure helped her through the usual shutdown paperwork — closing out payroll and taxes, getting investor consents in order, and filing paperwork with the IRS. Then came the part nobody puts in the founder playbook: selling off cielo24’s 13-year digital footprint—every Slack joke, every Jira ticket, emails documenting internal victories or frustrations sitting in employees’ multi-terabyte Google Drives—as training data for the next generation of AI. For that, cielo24 received “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” which Johnson said helped her go from “I don’t know how we are going to pay our bills" to "we can tie this up neatly with a bow and be able to walk away".

“I’m still a bit emotional about shutting the company down,” she told Forbes. “But it’s cool to think that our data could be useful, live on and help other people.”

It’s a clean ending for a messy reality: the company didn’t survive, but its work trail did. And in 2026, that trail can be worth real money. Johnson’s data sale isn't an isolated exit strategy; it is a new frontier in the AI arms race."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-training-data-your-old-work-slacks-and-emails/

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Google invests $10 million to teach factory workers AI as automation anxiety grows

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://nerds.xyz/2026/04/google-ai-training-manufacturing-workers/

Engadget: Three YouTubers accuse Apple of illegal scraping to train its AI models. “Three YouTube channels have banded together and filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, as first spotted by MacRumors. According to the lawsuit, the creators behind h3h3 Productions, MrShortGameGolf and Golfholics have accused Apple of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by scraping copyrighted […]

https://winbuzzer.com/2026/04/09/google-reiterates-that-gemini-does-not-train-on-gmail-data-xcxwbn/

Google Reiterates That Gemini Does Not Train on Gmail Data

#AI #Google #GoogleGemini #Gmail #AITraining #Privacy #DataPrivacy #Email #EmailPrivacy #BigTech

https://winbuzzer.com/2026/04/09/youtubers-sue-apple-for-scraping-videos-to-train-ai-xcxwbn/

YouTubers Sue Apple for Scraping Videos to Train AI Models

#AI #Apple #YouTube #GenAI #AITraining #AIModels #DataScraping #Copyright #Lawsuits #FairUse #BigTech #AIEthics

All Content from Business Insider | Meta paused its work with AI training startup Mercor after a data breach by Kelsey Vlamis,Charles Rollet

Meta paused its work with the AI training startup Mercor.Davide Bonaldo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Meta has paused its work with Mercor and is investigating after a data breach, a person familiar said.Mercor confirmed to Business Insider that it was recently affected by a security incident.Mercor works with major companies by providing training data for AI models.Meta has paused its work with Mercor and is investigating after a recent data breach at the AI training startup, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to Business Insider.

Mercor, which was valued at $10 billion in a funding round in October, works with major tech companies like Meta to train AI models with the help of thousands of human contractors and experts. Wired first reported on Friday that Meta had paused all its work with the company.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Read more: https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-pauses-work-mercor-ai-training-investigating-data-breach-2026-4

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TorrentFreak: Judge Allows BitTorrent Seeding Claims Against Meta, Despite Lawyers ‘Lame Excuses’. “In an effort to gather material for its LLM training, Meta used BitTorrent to download pirated books from Anna’s Archive and other shadow libraries. According to several authors, Meta facilitated the infringement of others by ‘seeding’ these torrents. This week, the court granted the […]