By Suzanne Rowan Kelleher
Publication Date: 2026-08-18 20:31:00
Topline
Google agreed to pay $10 million for an enormous trove of business data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines—raising questions about what happens to privacy after a company goes belly up and AI swoops in.
In early May, check-in counters for Spirit Airlines at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston were permanently closed.
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Key Facts
Google beat out other AI firms to acquire Spirit Airlines’ internal business data after the airline went bankrupt, according to a court filing last Friday.
Google hopes the “enterprise dataset” from Spirit Airlines will “be helpful in improving our products and AI models,” a Google spokesperson told Forbes in an email.
The raw data includes nearly 100 million passenger names and nearly 13 million active email addresses as well as nearly 176,000 employee records and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, according to court documents.
A court-appointed third-party ombudsman will oversee a process known as “deidentification,”…
