AI startup micro1 bids $12.5M for Spirit’s records, topping Google’s agreed $10M deal

The AI training-data company micro1 has offered $12.5M for Spirit Aviation’s internal records, topping Google’s agreed $10M and proposing an ombudsman chosen by Spirit’s advisers rather than the buyer. European law would treat the deidentification promise as a question about capability rather than a label, but none of it applies to an American liquidation.

An AI training-data company has offered $12.5M for the internal records of a dead airline, $2.5M more than Google agreed to pay. micro1 made the offer in a court filing on Thursday, Bloomberg News reported.

Spirit Aviation Holdings stopped flying in May and is being liquidated. The records include 500 million Microsoft Teams items, 100 million emails and roughly 16 million customer chat sessions.

TNW reported last month that under the Google agreement Spirit must hand the material to parties the buyer designates. Google picked and paid for the deidentification firm, and that cost does not come off the price.

micro1’s pitch is aimed squarely at that. It proposes an ombudsman selected by Spirit’s own advisers, and says the data would be stored in the United States.

The court filing also excludes disciplinary and investigatory material, and anything connected to collective bargaining with the unions that represented Spirit staff. Those unions have already challenged the Google sale on privacy grounds.

Google says it will not receive any personal information from the dataset and will pay a third party to strip out sensitive customer details. A judge considers its purchase on 9 September.

Courts rarely reopen an auction that has already closed, so micro1 faces a procedural problem rather than a pricing one.

One detail complicates the premium. Google’s agreement left customer chat sessions out of the sale, along with loyalty records and call recordings, and micro1’s offer names roughly 16 million sessions.

In Europe none of this would turn on the word deidentified. The Court of Justice ruled last September that pseudonymised data is personal data or not depending on whether the recipient can realistically identify anyone.

That is a question about capability, not labelling. The Google contract requires preserving referential integrity, which keeps pseudonymous records linked to each other across systems.

The European Data Protection Board has also said a model trained on personal data is not automatically anonymous, and that regulators may examine whether training data was lawfully obtained.

Purpose limitation would bite too. Records generated to fly aircraft and pay 17,000 staff were not gathered to train models, and reusing them in the EU needs its own legal basis.

None of that applies here. Spirit’s estate is wound up under American law, which is why this is a bidding war rather than a regulatory question, and why EU data laws would have made it one.