Google Will Pay to Scrub Spirit Airlines' Emails Before Training AI on Them, After Unions Fought the Sale

Google is still paying $10 million for the inside of a dead airline. But before it gets Spirit Airlines' emails, chat logs and files to train its AI models, the data will be scrubbed at Google's expense, and the most sensitive records about Spirit's former employees will not be in the box at all.

Unions representing Spirit's flight attendants and pilots withdrew their objections to the sale on Monday night, after Spirit filed a revised proposal in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The deal now goes to a judge, who is set to approve it next week, with a hearing scheduled for November 17.

What the unions won

Health and medical information, drug and alcohol test records, disciplinary files, safety program records and identification documents are excluded. The revised filing also leaves out payroll, crew pairings, biometrics and union grievance filings, according to Skift.

Everything else will be de-identified to ISO 27559, a stricter international standard than the US one Spirit planned to use. Tonic AI will do the scrubbing, under the new terms, and an independent verification agent picked with the unions will check the result. Google is barred from trying to re-identify anyone and has to keep the data confidential, in a secure environment.

The unions argue they had to fight for this because no federal or state law, and nothing in the Bankruptcy Code, protects workers' privacy in a sale like this one.

What Google still gets

The archive is enormous. By Skift's count, the filing covers about 1.9 billion internal emails across 91,000 accounts, 664 million Microsoft Teams items, 91 million SharePoint and OneDrive files and roughly 30 million lines of code, plus booking curves, vacation package data and fares.

Passengers were dealt with earlier. A privacy ombudsman recommended approval last month once personal information on 97 million Spirit customers was removed from the sale. Google has said it does not want any personal data from Spirit, and the new terms let it walk away if the search term exclusions shrink the volume of data it is buying.

Spirit stopped flying in May, and Google won the auction for its business data in August. It is not the only AI company that has looked at failed businesses as a source of training data: SpaceX has held talks about buying records from dead startups to feed Grok.

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