A group of 114 members of Congress is urging Google and Spirit Airlines to stop a proposed deal in which Google would pay the defunct carrier $10 million for internal company data to train AI models, The Record reported Thursday. The lawmakers say the trove, which includes employee messages and payroll records, could expose former Spirit workers even if names are removed.

What Happened

The letter, sent Thursday to the CEOs of Google and Spirit, was led by Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. According to The Record, the data set covers about 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, along with employment contracts, employee records, timecards, and payroll and tax information.

The lawmakers argued that stripping out names, email addresses and other direct identifiers does not necessarily make a data set anonymous. They asked the companies to call off the transaction or, failing that, to take several steps: give employees a voice in how the data is de-identified, exclude as much employee information as possible, restrict how the data may be used and commission an independent review of employee confidentiality.

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Google told The Record it is not seeking to buy any personal information from Spirit and that such information will either be left out entirely or de-identified by an independent third party before Google receives the data. The Record said Spirit, which has ceased operations, had no press contact available for comment.

Why It Matters

The proposal shows how far AI developers are going to find training material for agents meant to handle office work. Years of real emails, chat threads and HR records capture how a large company actually operates, which is the kind of material synthetic or public web data cannot easily supply.

It also raises a consent question with no clear answer. The employees who wrote those messages did so for their jobs, not for an AI training set, and when a company shuts down, its records can become an asset to be sold. Workplace messages often contain details about health, family matters, disputes and pay that can identify a person through context, even after names are removed, which is the core of the lawmakers' objection.

For Horsford, the issue is local. Spirit announced plans to shut down in May, and almost 1,000 people lost their jobs in Las Vegas, parts of which lie in his district, according to The Record.

Context

The United States has no comprehensive federal privacy law, and no federal rule specifically addresses whether a company's internal communications can be sold to train AI. That leaves the terms of a deal like this one largely to the buyer and seller, and puts weight on how rigorously the promised de-identification is carried out and checked.

What to Watch

The Record did not report whether the deal requires any further approval or when it might close. Key questions are whether Google and Spirit respond to the letter, whether they name the third party that would scrub the data and what standard it would use, and whether former employees are given any role before records change hands.