SpaceXAI Eyes Bankrupt Startups' Data to Train Grok — SkimNews
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- SpaceXAI held informal internal talks about buying customer and operational data from failed startups to train Grok, with people familiar telling Bloomberg the discussions might go nowhere.
- Google set the precedent by paying $10 million in a bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' records — roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, and decades of employee files — all headed into an AI training pipeline.
- A flight attendants' union objected in bankruptcy court, arguing that de-identifying records doesn't prevent piecing together who said what in years of internal chats; the court fight is still ongoing.
- Elon Musk told a SpaceX all-hands in August that Grok would also train on SpaceX's own internal records, reportedly saying "It will inherit your thoughts," without specifying which categories of employee data would actually be used.
- Grok 4.5 launched in July as SpaceXAI's first model since the February merger with xAI, with a delayed new Grok version and the $60 billion Cursor acquisition both on the near-term horizon.
Why it matters: Chapter 11 treats a customer database the same as office furniture — it gets auctioned to the highest bidder without asking the customers, because by the time the gavel drops the company no longer exists. That legal vacuum is now feeding frontier AI labs, and Musk is going further by declaring SpaceX's own employees' records fair game for Grok without naming what categories will be used.
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