The airline failed. Its data became an AI asset.

Spirit Airlines entered liquidation after years of financial trouble. A court filing says Google won a virtual auction for a deidentified data bundle for $10 million. The package spans 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams items, 17 million OneDrive files, 20.5 million SharePoint items, 30.9 million recorded customer-service calls, 15.8 million handled chats, and airline operations data. 12

The mechanism is a handoff: business activity becomes a cross-system archive, a deidentification process removes or transforms identifying elements while preserving useful relationships, and the buyer receives the transformed data for a reported AI purpose. The sale agreement says the buyer will keep it deidentified and will not intentionally associate it with a person or household. But deidentification is a risk control, not a force field: NIST says organizations should evaluate re-identification risk, data linkage, and the limits of simple masking before release. 23