Google Acquires Spirit Airlines’ Business Data for AI Development

Key facts

• Google agreed to pay $10 million to acquire bankrupt Spirit Airlines’ enterprise business data for improving AI products and models.
• The dataset includes nearly 100 million passenger names, nearly 13 million active email addresses, about 176,000 employee records, and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages.
• The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, representing more than 5,500 Spirit Airlines flight attendants, filed a court objection to the data sale.
• A U.S. bankruptcy judge postponed a court hearing on the matter until September 9, 2026.
• A court-appointed ombudsman will oversee a deidentification process intended to anonymize the data.
• Google said it will not receive personal information, but the flight attendant union raised concerns that individuals could still be reidentified from the deidentified dataset.
• AI companies are increasingly acquiring defunct businesses’ internal communications, including Slack archives, email threads, and Google Drive files, to train AI models.
• Mercor’s losing bid for the Spirit Airlines data was $7.5 million.