OpenAI, Anthropic Data Demand Turns Startups’ Slack Threads Into Prized Assets

Eight days after AI agent startup Warmly in late June agreed to be acquired by HubSpot, CEO Maximus Greenwald found an unusual email in his inbox. Mercor, a San Francisco startup that pays contractors to train AI models for labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, was offering to buy or license Warmly’s code base and records of its tasks and staff communication, for as much as $300,000. Warmly fielded four such approaches from companies like Mercor in the days after the HubSpot deal was...