Shuttered startups are selling old Slack chats and emails to AI companies

It’s really funny to train your AI on the data of failed companies. My coworker made a similar joke that if we trained an AI on our data they’d think our core business is helping dumbass users reset their passwords or fixing linting errors.

I thought it was against Slack's ToS to exfiltrate data like this?

Also surely most of a startup's Slack activity is just fluff - is there some amount of preprocessing the AI companies have to do, I wonder.

I was asked by someone today if there are such startups with COBOL based code bases...

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-tra... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801494)