AI Companies Desperate For Data Are Buying Up Dead Airlines’ Emails And Scanning Old Books

In May, Spirit Airlines, known for its affordable flights, shut down due to high jet fuel prices and steep debts. Now, Google says it’s buying internal data from the defunct airline for $10 million to train its AI models. The dataset includes hundreds of millions of employee emails, Microsoft Team messages, spreadsheets and calendars as well as operational data, all of which will be anonymized before it’s sold. The data is so valuable that it prompted a bidding war: Google won out over data labelling startup Mercor, which offered $7.5 million.

Enterprise data has become incredibly useful for AI training, since labs had already hoovered up the entire public internet by late 2024. Dead companies possess a treasure trove of digital leftovers like codebases, email threads, Slack messages and IT tickets that represent what a real workplace looks like, Forbes reported earlier this year. Startups like SimpleClosure and Sunset that help companies wrap up their businesses also now offer to buy their data for AI training.

Now let’s get into the headlines.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

Anthropic’s revenue run rate crossed $65 billion by the end of July, up from $47 million in May, Bloomberg reported. The Claude Code maker has emerged as the frontrunner in the AI race thanks to the popularity of its coding agent, with plans to go public later this year. (In comparison, OpenAI’s annualized revenue recently topped $40 billion.) Anthropic is also projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $200 billion, Reuters reported last week.

HUMANS OF AI

Camilla Clark, wife of Anthropic’s billionaire CEO Dario Amodei, keeps a low profile. There’s virtually no information about her online. But recent profiles reveal that Clark tried to court convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to invest in her “luxury porn company.” Before she started dating Amodei in 2014, she also started a “social dieting app.” She eventually connected Eric Schmidt, whom she used to date, with Amodei, leading the former Google CEO to invest in Anthropic’s Series A round. Today, Clark wields extensive influence over Amodei and his $965 billion company, counseling her husband through turbulent times and serving as a strategic adviser, the Wall Street Journal reported.

AI DEAL OF THE WEEK

AI video generation startup Higgsfield has raised $400 million in Series B funding at a $5.4 billion valuation. The round was led by DST Global with participation from Valor Capital, Goldman Sachs Capital and existing investors like Menlo Ventures and Accel. Launched in early 2025, the company has grown super fast, hitting $700 million in annualized revenue in 16 months.

Also notable: Payments giant Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter, a startup that allows companies to switch between AI models for different responses, for more than $7 billion, Bloomberg reported. The deal comes just months after OpenRouter raised funding at a $1.3 billion valuation.

DEEP DIVE

In 2017, James Dacombe dropped out of high school to found brain monitoring startup CoMind. Four years later, he took a Thiel Fellowship to skip college and build his first startup. Now the 25-year-old is Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire thanks to his two-year-old chipmaking company Olix, as well as an undisclosed stake in CoMind—which he still runs separately.

Founded in 2024, Dacombe’s London-based Olix tripled its valuation in six months to $3.3 billion in early August, after raising $312 million from investors including NYC-based investment firm Fundomo, Nasdaq-listed chip designer Arm, American quant fund Hudson River Trading and Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings. The UK government’s Sovereign AI fund also backed Olix in the round. The new round pushes Dacombe, who owns an estimated 30% of the company, into the three comma club. He also has a 12% stake in CoMind, which raised $102.5 million in August 2025 but did not disclose its valuation. Olix and CoMind did not respond to Forbes’ request for comment.

Dacombe is one of eleven self-made billionaires in the world who have yet to turn 30 and one of just four from outside the U.S.

The next youngest self-made European billionaire after Dacombe is Arvid Lunnemark, a cofounder of popular AI code editing company Cursor. The Swede came to the U.S. to attend MIT and cofounded the firm with three college friends in 2022. Now a San Francisco resident, Lunnemark, 26, and his three cofounders all nearly doubled their fortunes to an estimated $2.4 billion on Friday, after SpaceX acquired Cursor for $60 billion. Cursor’s oldest cofounder, Pakistani citizen Sualeh Asif, is also 26.

Coincidentally, there is yet another 26-year-old Swedish billionaire whose fortune nearly doubled earlier this week. Lovable’s cofounder Fabian Hedin, who lives in Stockholm and is just a few months older than Lunnemark, became a billionaire in December when his vibe coding startup raised funds at a $6.6 billion valuation. Lovable announced earlier this week it raised another $400 million round at a $13.3 billion valuation, nearly doubling Hedin’s net worth to an estimated $3.1 billion.

These young titans are part of a global startup boom that’s minting younger and younger billionaires at a breakneck speed. In the United States, the title of youngest self-made billionaire has changed hands several times in the past year alone. Currently, the youngest self-made billionaire in the world is American Surya Midha, who was 22 when Mercor, the AI recruiting startup he cofounded, raised funds at a $10 billion valuation in October and boosted his net worth to an estimated $2.2 billion. Midha edges out his cofounders Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath who are each roughly two months younger. (They are now all 23.) Midha took the title from Polymarket's Shayne Coplan, 28, who had taken it weeks earlier from Scale AI's Alexandr Wang, 29.

Read the full story on Forbes.

MODEL BEHAVIOR

AI companies are buying physical books en masse, scanning their pages to feed into large language models and destroying them afterwards. A recent 404 Media investigation, which tracked an order of rare books by placing an Apple AirTag inside one of the books, found that Amazon bought millions of rare, antique and out-of-print books, then sent them to a secretive Amazon-owned warehouse in Nevada where employees cut off the books’ bindings to scan their content. The facility, codenamed VGT3, included a logo of a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to eat an open book.