Google buys Spirit's bankruptcy data for AI

Google agreed to pay roughly $10 million for a large archive of bankrupt Spirit Airlines’ business data, a deal that needs a federal bankruptcy judge’s approval. The archive includes about 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, 7.2 billion competitor-flight records, 7.5 billion passenger transaction records dating to 2008, and more than 175,000 employee records covering HR files, productivity data, and internal audits. Google says it will de-identify the data and strip customer and personal identifiers before using it to improve products and train AI models. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA is filing a court objection, arguing that while the deal requires scrubbing customer data, no equivalent protection exists for the thousands of former Spirit employees whose records are included.