Failed companies are selling old Slack chats and email archives to train AI

What’s happening

It has been reported that shuttered startups and distressed companies are quietly packaging and selling their old Slack conversations and email archives as training data for AI systems. The claim surfaced on Reddit and has rippled through tech circles — private group chats, internal debates, and customer exchanges turned into datasets. Allegedly, buyers include data brokers and AI firms hungry for real-world text. Creepy? Yes. Profitable? Apparently.

The content and the worry

According to the posts, these archives don’t only contain dry status updates. They may include code snippets, product roadmaps, customer support threads and personally identifiable information — the kind of stuff you wouldn’t expect to end up as fodder for a chatbot. It has been reported that some sellers are former founders, liquidators, or employees trying to monetize leftover digital property after a collapse. That makes this more than a niche marketplace; it’s a potential privacy time bomb.

Legal and ethical red flags

This raises obvious legal and ethical questions. Scraping or selling internal communications could run afoul of privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA, breach NDAs, or expose trade secrets. Companies and former employees may be walking into a minefield, and affected customers or colleagues could find their private messages repurposed without consent. Regulators are still playing catch-up with how training data is sourced — and this kind of gray-market supply chain doesn’t make oversight any easier.

Why you should care

Beyond the legalities, there’s an emotional hit: people’s offhand jokes, panicked “we’re doomed” messages, and candid feedback being recycled into a product they never agreed to train. It’s a vivid snapshot of a broader trend — AI’s ravenous demand for data colliding with the messy realities of corporate failure. So ask yourself: would you want your old office chat powering the next virtual assistant? If not, maybe it’s time for clearer rules about who gets to sell what when a company goes belly-up.

Sources: reddit