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AI Labs Chase Slack Data, Raising New Workplace Privacy Risks

Shanna Johnson spent 13 years building cielo24, a transcription and captioning startup. When the company shut down, she sold its entire internal archive — every Slack message, email and Jira support ticket — to an AI company for "hundreds of thousands of dollars," Forbes reported. It's part of a fast-growing trade: SimpleClosure, a startup that helps founders wind down failed companies, has processed nearly 100 similar data deals in the past year and recovered more than $1 million for founders, with typical payouts between $10,000 and $100,000 per company, according to Forbes.

AI labs largely exhausted the public internet as training material — Reddit threads, Wikipedia entries, digitized books — by late 2024, said Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist, in comments cited by Forbes. To push agentic AI toward real workplace competence, labs now need examples of how work actually happens: internal decisions, messy back-and-forth, and support conversations that public datasets don't capture.

That need is fueling a boom in "reinforcement learning gyms," simulated work environments where AI agents rehearse tasks using real organizational data. Anthropic is weighing spending $1 billion on RL gyms this year, gym-builder Prime Intellect is now valued over $1 billion, and rival Fleet was in talks to raise at a $750 million valuation, Forbes reported, citing The Information. SimpleClosure CEO Dori Yona described the scramble for data as "a feeling of a gold rush from these companies trying to get their hands on real-world data."

Not everyone is comfortable with the trade. Marc Rotenberg, founder of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, told Forbes that even anonymized workplace archives raise concerns because "it's not generic data. It's identifiable people" — a reference to the personal messages, disputes and performance conversations often buried in years of internal chat logs. Gizmodo's coverage of the trend noted that SimpleClosure's new Asset Hub product is built to strip personally identifiable information before data changes hands.

What this means for job seekers and employees in AI-adjacent industries

If you're joining an early-stage startup, read the employment agreement closely. IP-assignment and data-ownership clauses typically give employers broad rights over internal communications, and that now extends to licensing your Slack messages and support tickets to an AI lab if the company folds or sells off its assets. It's worth asking, before you sign, what happens to your workplace data if the company shuts down — and whether anonymization is a contractual commitment or just a promise.

For anyone mapping how to choose a career path as AI reshapes hiring, understanding how a prospective employer treats internal data — and how well the industry around reinforcement learning gyms (Prime Intellect, Fleet and others named by Forbes) is capitalized — is becoming as relevant as the job description itself.