Shuttered startups are selling old Slack chats and emails to AI companies
doctaj
26 points
6 comments
April 17, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (5 comments)
doctaj
https://archive.ph/WTtUo
KuriousCat
I was asked by someone today if there are such startups with COBOL based code bases...
sudb
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.
ChrisArchitect
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-tra... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801494 )
hyperadvanced
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.