Exclusive: Consumers could get paid for AI training data

Verb , a data exchange, is launching a marketplace Thursday that lets consumers sell their personal data directly to companies, the company first shared with Axios.

Why it matters:AI companies have spent years buying — or just scraping — datasets from publishers, app developers and data brokers. Verb is betting consumers will want a cut for themselves.

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What they're saying:Verb is the place that people "will go to monetize something that for decades we've given away for free," Cyrus Beschloss, Verb's CEO and co-founder, told Axios.

• Beschloss argues the marketplace could create "a completely new asset class," though previous attempts to pay consumers directly for personal data have struggled to gain traction.

• AI labs are expected to be the biggest buyers, Beschloss said, because they require vast amounts of data to be able to train upcoming models.

How it works:Users add the Verb tracker to their phone and it starts collecting selected activity, including shopping habits and social media use.

• You can toggle off any categories of data you don't want collected, like search activity, for example. The more you share, the more you can charge.

• You set the price for your data, but Verb will provide an estimate based on what you share.

• Then any company can buy that data, though users can also select certain companies they don't want to sell their data to.

Reality check:Privacy concerns abound with this marketplace.

• Verb says it excludes certain categories from analysis, including passwords, text messages and health data.

• Beschloss acknowledged the risks of data breaches and said the platform was designed with those threats in mind.

• '"If we can't tell users that their data is safe, then we are not a company... and we don't deserve to be if we can't do that," Beschloss said.

Zoom out:Companies already spend billions collecting, licensing and buying consumer data from apps, advertisers and data brokers, but consumers themselves rarely participate in those transactions or receive any payment.

• Verb's pitch is that AI demand creates an opportunity to move consumers into the middle of that market — as the sellers instead of simply the product.

• As AI companies search for fresh, high-quality data to train future models, proprietary behavioral data may become more valuable than the web data many models have already consumed.

Zoom in:The exchange of personal data and privacy for access to technology is already common practice in the tech world.

• Mercor helps AI companies hire humans to create new training data or evaluate model outputs based on their expertise.

• Meta on Wednesday released a coding agent with prices that drop significantly if you let the company train its models on your work.

• A startup called Vana — spun out from MIT — asks users to pool their own data with others and then collectively decide what companies can train on it.

The bottom line:Verb's bet is that consumers will prefer getting paid directly for the data they generate instead of giving it away implicitly.

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