Google has agreed to carve employee records out of its $10 million purchase of Spirit Airlines' data, filing revised terms in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York on Monday, according to The Wall Street Journal. The amended agreement resolves objections from the unions representing Spirit's pilots and flight attendants, though it still requires bankruptcy court approval.

The unions had warned that workers' personal records could be used to train commercial AI tools. More than 120 congressional lawmakers wrote to Spirit and Google in October, pressing for stronger safeguards for the carrier's former employees.

What does the revised agreement change?

Under the new terms, the sale excludes a broad range of worker records:

• Medical files
• Drug and alcohol test results
• Investigations tied to labor matters
• Records of grievances and arbitration
• Performance reviews and payroll data
• Other employment-related materials

An independent verifier will examine how the data is used and confirm that confidentiality and security obligations are met, according to the Journal.

The unions had argued that the original terms gave consumers stronger privacy protections than they gave airline employees. A Spirit spokesperson said the carrier welcomed settling the unions' disputes over the "sale of deidentified data" while it works to extract maximum value for creditors.

Who won the auction, and what does the data contain?

Google won the August bankruptcy auction for Spirit's digital archives, beating a $7.5 million offer from Mercor, an AI hiring platform. The archives hold decades of payroll, travel and recruiting files, roughly 100 million emails, 80,000 email accounts and millions of additional digital items.

Google has said the purchase excludes personal information and that it intends to apply the data toward improving its products and AI models. The company also stated that a third party would scrub personally identifiable information (data that can identify a specific individual) from the records before handoff.

Why did unions call this a workers' rights issue?

Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, framed the dispute as a defining test of employee protections in the AI era. "Worker data privacy in the age of AI has become a whole new worker's rights issue," Nelson said Tuesday, according to the Journal. "Without our union, there would have been no one to speak for workers in this fire sale of their private information. We fought and we won brand new protections."

Her comment points to the asymmetry the unions identified in the original deal: consumer data carried built-in safeguards, while employment records — medical files, arbitration histories, payroll — faced no equivalent limits until the revision.

What led Spirit to sell its archives?

Spirit ceased operations earlier this year after a government rescue package collapsed, leaving roughly 17,000 employees and contractors without work. The carrier entered bankruptcy proceedings, and the sale of its digital archives forms part of the effort to recover value for creditors.

Google, a unit of Alphabet, agreed to pay $10 million for the internal business data after winning the auction. The revised agreement now moves to the bankruptcy court for final approval, with the union settlement and the independent verification mechanism attached as enforceable conditions.

The case sets a precedent for how employee data is treated in distressed corporate sales, where digital archives can outlive the businesses that created them.