When Spirit Airlines shut down in May, it left behind more than planes and gates. It left years of its workers' emails and chats. Google bid $10 million for that internal data to help train its AI, and now lawmakers want limits.

In a letter on Thursday, members of Congress led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Steven Horsford asked Spirit CEO Dave Davis and Google CEO Sundar Pichai to exclude and protect workers' data before any of it changes hands, PYMNTS reported. Law360 described the group as mostly Democrats.

The sale would cover about 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, plus 17 million OneDrive files and 516 code libraries, PYMNTS reported. The lawmakers warned that the records may include medical requests, discipline files and pay data.

Horsford said former Spirit workers did not hand over their information "so it could be sold to train a different company's AI."

Google says it does not want any of that. "We are not looking to buy any personal information from Spirit," a spokesperson told PYMNTS. The data will be removed or stripped of names by an independent third party before Google gets it, the company said.

Passengers already won some protection. On Monday, a court-appointed privacy watchdog, Lucy Thomson, told the court the sale could go ahead because data on Spirit's 97 million customers would be cut out or scrubbed, the Sun Sentinel reported. But Thomson said she did not study the risks to workers. She also warned that "technology has far outpaced the law" on protecting scrubbed data.

Why does Google want it? Real business records can teach AI models how companies actually run, PYMNTS noted. Spirit also got a $7.5 million bid from AI data firm Mercor.

The next step is a hearing before U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane in White Plains, New York, on October 14.

What we know: The judge will weigh the sale on October 14, with customer data excluded.
What we don't: Whether worker records will be removed before Google gets them.