Marked included

On 14 August 2026 Spirit Airlines, in Chapter 11, told the bankruptcy court in New York that an auction of its "Deidentified Data" had been won by Google at 10 million dollars, with Mercor.io, a company that places human experts with AI labs, as the alternate bidder at 7.5 million. The asset schedule attached to the notice marks what is included. It includes 175,658 employee records going back to August 1986, 3,426,618 payroll records, 1,092,000 time-card records, 100,000,000 emails across 80,000 accounts, 17,082,644 OneDrive items, 20,577,677 SharePoint items and 500,000,000 Teams items. It includes 516 source-code repositories of about 30 million lines, with 43,170 pull requests and 372,585 commits. The definition of the assets names "employee behavior and productivity data".

On 5 October the court's Consumer Privacy Ombudsman recommended approval, because the parties had since removed the passenger transaction systems and hired a vendor to deidentify the email. Her report carries a section on "security in the AI training environment" and a footnote saying she "did not investigate or reach any conclusion" on risks to affected employees. On 8 October Representative Steven Horsford and Senator Elizabeth Warren led 119 members of Congress in a letter to the chief executives of Spirit and Google asking for protections for the workers.

The claim on the table

Chapters 1, 3 and 6 argue that a worker's own output is the training input for the systems that flatten the worker's advantage, and that it is taken without royalty, consent or any claim on the resulting asset. The register watches for firms training models on employee work product, and for the opposite: a durable royalty, or workers winning an enforceable claim on the corpus they made, or a firm backing off on consent grounds and staying backed off.

Whose privacy

The earlier entries on this claim concern an employer that takes its own staff's work. This one has no employer left to take it. The airline is an estate and the data are a line in its list of assets, to be sold to the highest bidder free and clear of claims. The workers' union objected on 18 August, after the sale was noticed.

The architecture of the sale shows whom it was built for. The Bankruptcy Code's privacy machinery protects consumers, so the ombudsman looked at the passengers, and the parties answered her by excluding the passenger databases. The flight attendants' union said as much on 18 August: the privacy design is "consumer-facing", while the payload is "disproportionately employee-facing". Its objection adds that the sale agreement requires deidentification to preserve "referential integrity across the data set", so that the joins between timekeeping, training, payroll and messages survive, and that the workers are expressly denied third-party beneficiary rights. In the schedule the consumer rows are marked Not Included. The employee rows are marked Included.

The data are also the product of the work itself: 500 million Teams items, 30 million lines of code, payroll and training records. The workers wrote it as a condition of the job, and at the sale it is priced at 10 million dollars in the agreed sale against 175,658 employee records. The filings this ledger read reserve no part of that sum, or any claim on what is built from the data, for the people who made it.

The honest hedge

Most of this does not fit the claim's wording cleanly. The buyer is Google, not the employer, and the filings do not say what Google will do with the data beyond the ombudsman's reference to an AI training environment; the claim that it will train models on it rests on that reference and on the congressional letter, not on a covenant. Google has said it will not receive personally identifiable information and that the data will be scrubbed by a third party first. A large part of the corpus is business records, not individual expertise. The ombudsman recommended approval, the passenger systems are out, and the court has not yet ruled. A third bidder, micro1, filed a notice on 3 September of intent to submit a higher bid; the filings give no amount. If the court conditions approval on removing employee content, as the union asks, or if the order gives workers an enforceable limit on use, this entry will be rescored as complicates. A hearing on the sale is reported for 14 October.

Why this confirms

This entry scores the agreed sale and the process around it, not a completed transfer; the hedge says what a closing order would change. The confirms clause is firms training models on employee work product with no compensation to those who made it. A bankrupt employer is selling the record of its workers' output, including their code, to a buyer for which the court's own officer reviews an AI training environment, the workers' union has objected on the record, and the privacy review the process provides did not cover them. The Bonus Problem asks who is paid when the expert's work trains the machine. Here the answer is the estate, which has agreed to sell it for 10 million dollars, and the filings read here reserve nothing for the people who wrote the emails.

Who owns the machine?