In its quest to secure cheaper training data for its Grok robot, SpaceX is considering buying customer data from struggling or bankrupt companies, according to Bloomberg.
This move comes after the company announced a massive $15.8 billion commitment to its artificial intelligence efforts, even though its xAI division ended the quarter with a net operating loss of $1.3 billion.
Musk has ambitious plans for the Grok robot to catch up with competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic, with the company intending to unveil the Grok 5 model before the end of the year, a model that Musk claims will reach the level of artificial general intelligence (an AI system capable of performing any mental task that a human can do), which requires huge amounts of training data.
These discussions are still informal and may not lead to an agreement. But if the deal goes through, it will have serious privacy consequences, as any company that once provided you with services and is now facing financial difficulties could find itself selling your data to Musk.
company seeking data. As AI agents proliferate in workplaces, AI labs are increasingly prioritizing specialized knowledge in each sector. Consequently, a new niche market has emerged where struggling companies sell their employee data to AI labs.
In a bankruptcy auction last month, Google offered $10 million for the data of the now-defunct Spirit Airlines to train its Gemini models. Although Spirit did not include passenger information, the data sold included 100 million company emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams conversations from former employees, aircraft operations and employee productivity data, one million timecard records, 17 million Microsoft OneDrive items, and hundreds of thousands of employee records including tax forms, employment contracts, and litigation files.
Google confirmed that the data would be stripped of personally identifiable information, but that was not enough for the Association of Flight Attendants, which represents former Spirit employees, and filed an objection with the bankruptcy court in New York, arguing that the "de-identification" standards only cover consumers, leaving employees' private data, including travel records and tax forms, vulnerable.
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