AI labs want your Slack DMs. Your boss is already selling them.

AI companies are paying anywhere from $100,000 to $2 million for access to anonymised internal records: Slack messages, Google Docs, PowerPoints, CRM data, onboarding checklists. The reasoning is straightforward enough. If you want to build an AI agent that behaves like a competent office worker, you need to train it on how competent office workers actually behave.

The darker detail is who profits. Not the employees whose daily digital footprint is being packaged and sold. Business owners are getting 48-hour exploding offers, sometimes finding out via the media that their data has already changed hands, as Doug Kreuzkamp of Springshot did in August when he learned Google had bought fifteen years of his company's work. From a Zoom call. In real time.

Meta tried harvesting its own employees' keystrokes and mouse movements, which leaked internally and exposed private conversations and performance records before the project was suspended. Elon Musk took a warmer approach, telling SpaceX staff in August they should think of themselves as Grok's "parents."

The data protection law that might govern any of this does not currently exist.