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Stephen Council/BI
As AI labs go on the hunt for real-world data, Micro1 is throwing everything at getting it for them.
The startup is one in a new class of fast-moving data brokers, gobbling up companies' internal data and packaging it for the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other model developers. The executives who sell their companies' data to Micro1 find themselves suddenly participating in a new sector of the economy, where terabytes of mundane workplace interactions can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ilya Brotzky, the CEO and cofounder of the recruiting startup VanHack, told Business Insider he was shocked when he filled out a Micro1 survey about his company's data and received a "substantial" offer.
"I didn't believe it, to be honest," he said. "I felt like it was a little too good to be true."
Micro1 says it pays $100,000 to $2 million for a single midsize company's data. It recently announced plans to spend $1 billion on the project over the next year. Brotzky and the other executives Business Insider spoke to for this story wouldn't share the exact amounts their companies received.
For Micro1, the new focus on workplace data matches a broader evolution in the industry, as Business Insider has written about in The AI Data Grab, a series about how tech giants are increasingly turning to workers, users, and the physical world to get data to train AI.
First, AI companies gobbled up text from the internet and corpora of old books. Then they realized that humans grading AI responses could improve their models. And now, companies are using complex simulations, built on real-world data, to improve the tenacity and skill of their AI.
Micro1
Gartner estimated that spending on AI data is likely to surge from less than $1 billion last year to almost $6.5 billion in 2027. Micro1's chief revenue officer, William Almeida, told Business Insider in September that his company has been explaining to prospective customers why their data is suddenly so valuable for those simulations.
"Every time I talk to companies, I tell them, 'Hey, I see this as a booming business,'" Almeida said.
Micro1 has three ways of working with AI model developers.
First, it can take a company's raw data, transform it to protect privacy, and license it to a lab. In addition, Micro1 provides an in-progress AI agent to companies and gets feedback on how it works. The third route is the simulation: Micro1 takes a company's data up to a certain timestamp, freezes it, and then provides that "environment" to a model developer trying to teach its AI how to work from existing context.
Micro1 pays more for larger, more complex datasets, as well as for data that represents a unique type of work or knowledge. It usually wants to license a company's entire data corpus, so that an AI model can replicate what it would be like to be a human employee.
"The connection, the diversity, the traceability of all of these data points, they matter a lot when you think about model training," Almeida said.
Brotzky also received an offer from AI data startup Mercor to buy his company's data, though he opted for Micro1. Once Brotzky dug into Micro1's privacy process, he said he felt comfortable sharing all the data they requested. That included VanHack's Google suite, Confluence data, Slack messages, and customer relationship management software.
Grant Gooley, the CEO of the marketing agency MyPortal Marketing, also views his deal with Micro1 as an innovation. He has sold internal design files from Figma and Canva, as well as checklists from Monday.com.
"When we were building these processes years ago, I didn't think that we would be using it to support AI learning," Gooley said. "But doing that, it's very fulfilling."
Micro1 and its rivals are full steam ahead. Still, there are open questions. Former and current employees aren't likely to get any compensation from — or a voice in — their work becoming AI fodder. Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Emory University, previously told Business Insider that data sales are an "ethically gray area."
When pitching to potential customers, Almeida tells them this business is in the early days.
"If you wait too much, you won't get the premium that the first companies are getting," he said.
VanHack's team got a confidence boost from the Micro1 deal, Brotzky said, because of the additional revenue stream it represents
Gooley said he's kept MyPortal Marketing's employees in the loop about the deal with Micro1 and hasn't heard any complaints.
"I told my team that this is something that you're going to tell your grandchildren about one day, because we are literally supporting the future growth of marketing agencies," Gooley said.
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Four years of sanctions have not closed the door through which Russian metal still reaches Europe. The EU imported 1.6 million tons of Russian iron and steel products in the first eight months of 2026, paying 682 million euros, down 54% in value year on year, GMK Center, a Ukraine-based consulting company, reports, citing Eurostat data.
Every euro spent on Russian metal is revenue for a state waging war on Ukraine, and the EU has banned most of it: pig iron, direct-reduced iron, iron ore and ferroalloys. Yet one category still flows almost untouched: semi-finished steel, mostly slabs, which made up 97.8% of the imports, or 1.56 million tons worth 670 million euros.
Volumes dropped 55% year on year after the full ban on Russian pig iron and DRI took effect on 1 January 2026, and no pig iron, ferroalloys, iron ore, or DRI reached the EU from Russia in the period, the center found. Iron ore and ferroalloys fall under sectoral limits, and the largest Russian producers are subject to corporate sanctions.
Slabs are the gap in the wall. Belgium took 767,700 tons of Russian semi-finished steel, nearly half the EU total, and Italy 191,800 tons, the center said.
Demand still outstrips the rules, with a slab quota for the year to September 2026 standing at nearly 3 million tons and effectively used up within four months, the data showed. Scrap was the only other notable inflow, at 41,300 tons worth 11.7 million euros, down about a third.
The door is closing slowly, and not without a fight. The quota falls to 2.6 million tons for the year to September 2027, and to 2 million for the following year, the center added, yet attempts to halt Russian slab imports early have failed because the biggest consumer countries lobby against it.
Earlier, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy reported that the EU paid Russia €317 billion in goods since February 2022. The sum is €116 billion more than the €201 billion the bloc extended to Ukraine in financial aid over the same period.
In the cover image former NIAID director Fauci and his close advisor Morens
Introduction by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio
«A former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) employee pled guilty in federal court, today, to a conspiracy charge stemming from a scheme to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and the Federal Records Act in connection with communications about coronavirus research grants» we can read in statement released by United States Attorneys Office – District of Maryland.
David M. Morens, 78, of Chester, Maryland, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States. Morens served as a senior advisor in NIAID’s Office of the Director from 2006 through 2022.
He was therefore one of the closest collaborators of former NIAID director Anthony Fauci, who was charged by a US Senate committee with contempt for invoking the Fifth Amendment by failing to answer 111 questions about the cover-up of the SARS-CoV-2 laboratory theory and the efficacy and dangers of Covid vaccines.
If Fauci fails to benefit from the preemptive pardon granted to him by President Joseph Biden, he risks a sentence of a few months in prison, as contempt of American justice is a misdemeanor.
While according to the statement of O. Hayes, U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, Morens risks much more…
«Morens is facing up to five years in prison for conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States. Actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties. A federal district judge determines sentencing after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors».
He was charged with concealing funding for dangerous gain-of-function research aimed at enhancing viruses in the laboratory and conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology under Fauci’s supervision. But not only…
«Morens and Co-Conspirator 2 pledged to help Co-Conspirator 1 restore the termination of the bat coronavirus grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab».
The charges pertain to the notorious NIH grant titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence that funded Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric et al. to perform their gain-of-function research on SARS bat coronaviruses with their colleague Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Previous investigations by the two congressional committees have highlighted the concrete likelihood that the artificial SARS-COV-2 was created in China with the help of Fauci’s NIAID and other entities, including the US Pentagon (via the military agency DARPA), as confirmed by a CIA whstleblower.
This is not what emerges from the investigations in the Wuhan-Gates series by Gospa News, which have also targeted of well-founded suspicions other biolaboratories, such as those in Ukraine, the Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom, and the University of North Carolina.
The UNC, thanks to funding from Fauci and DARPA, collaborated with the American pharmaceutical company Moderna trough the microbiologist Raloh Baric who is one of the researcher in the grant for which was indicted Morens (details below).
Moderna has ended up at the center of our journalistic investigations for two reasons:
If we add to this that in 2017, Baric himself published the recipe for laboratory-generating Covid-19 and that in 2018, DARPA, after rejecting the extremely dangerous Refuse project presented by Daszak and Fauci, funded a top-secret experiment on the SARS virus together with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at the Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom, the evidence to partially exonerate the Wuhan Institute of Virology becomes abundant…
But let’s now analyze Morens’ case in detail, as reported in the statement from the Attorney General’s Office for the District of Maryland:
Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, Co-Conspirator 2, and others conspired during the COVID-19 pandemic to defraud the United States after NIH terminated Co-Conspirator 1’s grant. NIH terminated the grant, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, based on allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China. NIAID awarded the grant to Company 1 and Co-Conspirator 1, who made a subaward to the WIV.
Following the termination, Morens and Co-Conspirator 2 pledged to help Co-Conspirator 1 restore the termination of the bat coronavirus grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab. In anticipation that their communications would be requested through FOIA Requests, Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, and Co-Conspirator 2 agreed in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal Gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.
The co-conspirators used Morens’s personal Gmail account to exchange non-public NIH information; correspond about their efforts to influence NIH to fund Company 1; exchange edits to drafts of letters addressed to NIH leadership for Company 1 and Co-Conspirator 1; and “back-channel” information to Senior NIAID Official 1. According to court documents, each of these matters fell within Morens’s role as senior advisor and constituted federal records that needed to be created, maintained, and exchanged on government systems.
All these highly documented and detailed investigations of the Wuhan-Gates cycle instead prove Fauci’s covert direction under the aegis of the CIA, with which he has always collaborated, so much so as to induce the former director of US Intelligence ODNI, Havril Haines (an expert in bioweapons and former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency itself) to be the main accomplice (if not director…) in the conspiracy aimed at concealing the laboratory origin of SARS-Cov-2 for which Morens will be convicted.
This certainly isn’t proof that they, in previous research, engineered SARS-CoV-2 in a laboratory, but it highlights a conspiracy that not only leads to the assumption but also led subsequent ODNI director Tulsi Gabbard to declassify classified documents to publicly accuse Fauci.
Obviously, pointing the finger at China and whitewashing the US role.
Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio – Gospa News founder and director
by John Leake – originally published by Focal Points Substack
All links to previous Gospa News investigation have been added in the aftermath
The U.S. Department of Justice just announced in a press release that Former Senior NIAID Official Pleads Guilty to Charges Connected to Concealing Federal Records During COVID-19 Pandemic.
David M. Morens served as a Senior Advisor to the Director (specifically in NIAID’s Office of the Director) from 2006 through 2022, and was also a long-time senior advisor to former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The charges pertain to the notorious NIH grant titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence that funded Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric et al. to perform their gain-of-function research on SARS bat coronaviruses with their colleague Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The gist of the federal criminal charge to which Morens pleaded guilty is, according to the press release:
Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, Co-Conspirator 2, and others conspired during the COVID-19 pandemic to defraud the United States after NIH terminated Co-Conspirator 1’s grant. NIH terminated the grant, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, based on allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China. NIAID awarded the grant to Company 1 and Co-Conspirator 1, who made a subaward to the WIV.
Following the termination, Morens and Co-Conspirator 2 pledged to help Co-Conspirator 1 restore the termination of the bat coronavirus grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab. In anticipation that their communications would be requested through FOIA Requests, Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, and Co-Conspirator 2 agreed in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal Gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.
The co-conspirators used Morens’s personal Gmail account to exchange non-public NIH information; correspond about their efforts to influence NIH to fund Company 1; exchange edits to drafts of letters addressed to NIH leadership for Company 1 and Co-Conspirator 1; and “back-channel” information to Senior NIAID Official 1. According to court documents, each of these matters fell within Morens’s role as senior advisor and constituted federal records that needed to be created, maintained, and exchanged on government systems.
I perceive this criminal charge and guilty plea for conspiracy to defraud the US government as akin to Al Capone being convicted for income tax evasion. The real issue here is not the concealment of public records and communications, but the illegal creation and subsequent illegal concealment of a bio-weapon in a Chinese biosecurity lab that resulted in incalculable death and damage to all of humanity.
Though Morens will likely serve time behind bars, his guilty plea and his punishment for this particular act of fraud strike me as a distraction from the elephant in the room.
Morens was one of Fauci’s top advisors, and I find it highly conspicuous that he took such a keen personal interest in Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, which was reviewed by the NIH in January 2014—the beginning of the period covered by Dr. Fauci’s preemptive pardon, as I documented in my post President Biden’s Preemptive Pardon of Fauci.
by John Leake – originally published by Focal Points Substack
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