Lately a new kind of pitch has found its way into my inbox. “Not sure if you’ve heard,” writes someone named Nick, “but AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI are paying media companies such as Wired $350K to $1.8M as a one time fee for a copy of their old work records (documents, emails, slack messages, tickets, etc.) for training better models.”
Another email with a similar pitch (adding call transcripts to the list of desired information) raised the stakes to a possible $2 million. “Public data is exhausted, and the labs are spending over $45B on private data to build better models,” writes someone named Cora.
While I was aware that AI companies are buying expert data from various sources, there hasn’t been that much attention paid to it. But once I looked into it, I discovered that this business is way bigger than I suspected—and according to its practitioners, it could have as much impact on workers and society as the data centers that are dominating the news these days.
The companies that contacted me are part of an industry boom in data acquisition that’s been quietly buying the workflows of sizable companies and is still so hungry that it’s bleeding into our inboxes. A freelance writer recently wrote about her experience with a company called Handshake, which offered her $1,000 for her work on a single story. (She didn’t sell.) A representative from Handshake confirmed the offer to me: “We license professional documents across a lot of fields so the labs can test and train how models handle real knowledge work,” he said. “Journalism is one of those fields.” Handshake tells me that a big part of its business is buying graduate students’ papers and coursework.
An entrepreneur friend of mine tells me he’s been getting mail from multiple companies whose business is “helping startups wind down their companies,” as one email from a company named Sunset explained it. “We handle the full process, scrubbing and anonymizing the data so the company people and any identifying details are stripped out, then brokering the deal with the labs.”
Those newer data acquisition startups are hoping to achieve the quick success of the dominant companies in the field, which themselves are only a few years old. Industry leaders Handshake, Micro1, and Mercor are snapping up databases as if it were a modern gold rush. The industry leader seems to be Mercor, founded in 2023; last year its three cofounders became billionaires at 22. Like all the companies, it claims to have partnerships with just about all the major AI labs. (The response from the companies themselves was more circumspect: Anthropic acknowledges that there’s a big market for data, but told me that it doesn’t buy workflow from live companies like WIRED. OpenAI didn’t come up with a response before publication.)
In an interview, Mercor CEO Brendan Foody told me that the market is poised to explode as the AI industry seeks dramatically more data. Mercor originally started as an AI recruiting company, but as the team got to know the players, it learned that the big labs were frustrated by the quality of the data. Generally, the industry had been hiring experts to simulate actual workflow, but that didn’t capture the messiness of an actual operating business. He urged me to consider that Big AI has two bottomless needs: compute and data. While the industry is very publicly making giant investments in the former, data gathering is just as important.
