AI startup seeks Spirit Airlines’ business records from Google amid bankruptcy auction

Spirit Airlines stopped flying on May 2, 2026. But its digital exhaust, the millions of internal emails, chat messages, and lines of code generated over four decades, is now the subject of a multi-million dollar bidding war between Google and a pair of AI startups. Google won the initial auction on August 14 with a $10 million bid for access to Spirit’s de-identified business records. AI training startup Micro1 then submitted a late counter-offer of $12.5 million, throwing the bankruptcy court’s approval process into uncertainty ahead of a key hearing scheduled for September 9. What’s actually for sale The dataset includes roughly 100 million de-identified emails, approximately 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, around 30 million lines of custom software code, and employee files stretching back to 1986. The assets explicitly exclude passenger profiles, loyalty program data, and personally identifiable information. This is an operational dataset, the kind of internal communications corpus that reveals how a large organization actually functions day to day. The bidding war The auction played out in stages. Mercor, a data and talent company specializing in AI, served as the backup ...