Google just bought the corporate records of a defunct airline for $10 million to feed its AI models — and the thousands of workers who built those records have zero say in the matter. The Association of Flight Attendants filed an objection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court on Tuesday, arguing the deal protects consumer data but leaves former employees naked to the world's largest search company.
This is what happens when Big Tech and bankruptcy court collide: workers get liquidated right alongside the assets. Spirit Airlines, which shut down all operations after filing for bankruptcy twice, agreed to sell a vast trove of company records to Google on Friday. The data includes employee business travel records, crew training records, employee tax forms, and 100 million emails — all heading to Google's servers to train AI models.
The deal requires a third-party "deidentification agent" to scrub consumer information under the California Consumer Privacy Act. But as AFA lawyer Charles Rubio wrote in the objection, the CCPA "was built for customers, and no comparable screen has been applied to the employment record that this transaction actually conveys." Google says any data it receives will be "rigorously scrubbed" of personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt. But the union isn't buying it.
Rubio argued that even pseudonymized data can reveal which crew bases generated grievances, how flight attendants performed on training, which employees were under investigation, what compensation adjustments followed which events, and what workers said to each other about management, staffing, or their union. In other words: Google could learn exactly which workers organized and which didn't. The union wants the deal rejected unless it "expressly and categorically" excludes all flight attendant information.
The bankruptcy court has already delayed approval of the deal following the objection, with a hearing set for September 9.
Meanwhile, another bidder is circling. Ali Ansari, the 25-year-old CEO of AI training startup Micro1, told Business Insider his firm is offering $12.5 million for the data — a "materially higher" bid than Google's $10 million. Ansari called Google's winning bid "actually quite low" given Spirit's decades of operation. Micro1 missed the original auction deadline, and bankruptcy experts told Business Insider it would be unusual for the court to consider a late bid. Nancy Rapoport, a law professor at UNLV, said a "duly noticed, well-run auction generally won't get undone." But the bankruptcy code isn't clear, and it comes down to the judge.
Gizmodo framed the story around the workers' privacy fight; Business Insider buried the employee objection near the end and led with the bidding war. Both outlets covered the facts, but the framing tells you who each publication thinks matters more — AI startups or the people whose data is being sold.
The appetite for AI training data is insatiable. Big Tech already scraped the internet dry. Now it's picking through corporate bankruptcy proceedings. If courts greenlight this deal, every failed company's employee records become fair game for the highest bidder — and the workers who generated that data will have less protection than the customers who bought a plane ticket.
