Struggling startups are finding a new way to cash out: selling years of internal Slack chatter and email threads to companies hungry to train artificial intelligence. Forbes reports that firms specializing in shutting down startups are now helping founders package and license their internal communications, with some deals reportedly reaching six figures. The data is being fed into "reinforcement learning gyms," simulated workplaces where AI agents practice tasks using real company documents, workflows, and messages—everything from planning office events to handling routine work.
The models require more complex data than the news articles, Reddit threads, etc. that most large language models were trained on. One wind-down startup, SimpleClosure, has launched a tool called Asset Hub to help companies scrub, value, and sell this material, and says it has handled nearly 100 such transactions in the past year, Gizmodo reports. CEO Dori Yona described a "gold rush" for realistic corporate data.
But privacy advocates warn that even anonymized Slack logs and email archives can expose workers. "I think the privacy issues here are quite substantial," Center for AI and Digital Policy Founder Marc Rotenberg tells Forbes. "Employee privacy remains a key concern, particularly because people have become so dependent on these new internal messaging tools like Slack," he says. "It's not generic data. It's identifiable people."
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