Named outlets reading the SDNY bankruptcy docket report that Spirit selected Google LLC as winning bidder for a de-identified corporate dataset. Bankruptcy court filings show Spirit Airlines selected Google LLC as the winning bidder for its deidentified corporate data on Friday, August 14, 2026, at a price of ten million dollars, with Mercor.io Corporation placing the backup bid at seven and a half million; the notice was docketed as entry 1463 in Case No. 25-11897 (SHL) in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York .

Google confirmed the transaction on the record. Google told Axios the dataset will be scrubbed of personally identifiable information by a third party before the company receives it, with a spokesperson saying "We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models" . Google said the data will be "rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt" and won't include passenger profiles and loyalty program information, while it does include hundreds of millions of Teams chats and over 100 million emails, plus information "related to revenue, aircraft operations, employee productivity, and audits and fraud" .

Axios reports Google agreed to pay $10 million, that the data does not contain personally identifiable information according to a court filing by PJT Partners vice president Dylan Friesner, an investment banker for Spirit, and that the data will be "deidentified," meaning it won't be associated with individual people and the buyer agrees not to attempt to re-identify the users; a federal judge needs to approve the deal, and if it doesn't go through, AI-powered hiring platform Mercor was the next-highest bidder at $7.5 million .

The status changed on the day the post was published. Reuters reported that a U.S. bankruptcy court on Tuesday, August 18, delayed to September 9 the hearing to approve the sale, an adjournment that came as the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA filed an objection; the data on the block includes Spirit's employee emails, Microsoft Teams messages, spreadsheets, and calendars, as well as marketing, productivity, and operations data, and Google plans to use the data for product development and training its AI models . The AFA said it is seeking restrictions on the sale of flight attendant employee data and further protections for employees if the sale is approved, while Spirit has said the records would be de-identified, containing no customer information or personally identifiable information .

The union disputes that de-identification is sufficient. AFA states that the Sale Agreement provides that deidentification must preserve "referential integrity across the data set," meaning the linkages allowing records to be followed across systems are maintained, and that with a population the size of Spirit's flight attendants there are significant concerns that information about identifiable individuals or small identifiable groups could still be reconstructed . AFA states plainly that the sale has been announced but not yet approved, and that the data has not been turned over to Google . Bloomberg Law reports AFA's limited objection argues the tranche includes sensitive, decades-old employee and workplace records, and that the deal's privacy provisions are designed to protect passengers rather than employee data .

On the pre-scrubbing contents: Forbes reports the raw data includes nearly 100 million passenger names and nearly 13 million active email addresses as well as nearly 176,000 employee records and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, and that a court-appointed third-party ombudsman will oversee the deidentification process requiring "reasonable measures" to anonymize data .