There’s a new link in the food chain of tech startups. Founders are realizing that they can make an extra buck by selling off the digital remains of their dead companies in the form of their employees’ Slack messages and emails. And now, there’s a whole ecosystem of decomposers that specialize in helping them make that happen, Forbes reports.

Getting quality training data is half the battle with building an AI model, and fresh sources are increasingly hard to come by in a post-AI-ransacked internet. The data derived from a digital workplace like Slack is particularly valuable because of the industry’s heavy focus on building AI agents that can carry out work tasks, allowing AI researchers to construct a realistic sandbox the agents can learn in.

“Model companies are realizing the noise in the real-world environments is required to accurately test models,” Ali Ansari, whose company micro1 sells a mock holding company for AI agents to learn the ropes in.

These simulated workplace sandboxes are being called reinforcement learning gyms, or “RL gyms,” and creating them has become its own nascent industry. The demand is such that Anthropic is considering spending $1 billion on RL gyms this year, The Information reported, and multiple RL gym startups, such as Prime Intellect and Fleet, are now being valued around that same figure.

Founders of defunct startups are more than happy to do business with RL gym builders, and middlemen have emerged to facilitate these transactions. SimpleClosure, a company that styles itself the “TurboTax of shutting down,” recently launched a new tool called Asset Hub that allows moribund companies to sell off their Slack archives, emails, and libraries of code, and supposedly anonymizing that data before it finds a buyer. Its CEO Dori Yona told Forbes that it’s processed nearly 100 deals for defunct companies in the past year, recovering over $1 million dollars for their founders.

Of course, there’s an undeniable tension at the heart of the phenomenon. If you want to train an AI to succeed in business, is training it on the practices of a company that went out of business the best preparation?

And wherever data’s concerned, there are clear ethical and privacy risks. It would be an outrage if an employer recorded every conversation their employees had in a physical workplace and then sold them for profit, but when those conversations are facilitated digitally, selling them is seen as a shrewd bit of business that’s helping build the next generation of AI.

“I think the privacy issues here are quite substantial,” Marc Roteberg, founder of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, told Forbes. “Employee privacy remains a key concern, particularly because people have become so dependent on these new internal messaging tools like Slack.” 

“It’s not generic data,” Roteberg added. “It’s identifiable people.”

Experts also contest claims that the companies are anonymizing the data they’re pawning off.

“If anonymization’s not done correctly, there are risks that companies who have access to the data would be able to see the activities of individual organizations and people, and then if not treated carefully, could leak into model output,” Bobby Samuels, the CEO of Protege, a company that vets and sells data to AI developers, told Forbes.

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