How to verify an AI buyer before sharing your company data

You verify an AI buyer by confirming its legal identity, checking that you own the data, reviewing its de-identification workflow, and understanding the licensing terms. Those four checks give you a solid baseline before any data ever moves.

Identify the business

Ask the buyer for its incorporation number, tax ID, or the equivalent registration in the jurisdiction it claims to operate. A legitimate lab will either send you a copy of its certificate of incorporation or point you to a public business registry where the record can be viewed.

Request an "about us" page that lists a physical address, a phone number, and the senior leadership team. Look up the address on a map; a mailbox-only location or a virtual office should raise a red flag. A brief corporate profile that includes the founding year and recent funding rounds is also useful. Real labs share this information freely because it builds credibility without exposing any proprietary technology.

Confirm data-ownership rights

Your data is yours if it was created as part of normal business operations, tickets, chat threads, CRM entries, SOPs, and accounting exports all count as "company data."

Look through the contracts you have with customers, partners, and employees. Make sure those agreements permit de-identified use in a third-party AI project. If a clause could be read as prohibiting the export of anonymized records, you need to get permission before moving forward.

Not sure your company is a fit? Take the free check

Review the de-identification process

A trustworthy buyer never sees raw personally identifiable information (PII). Ask for a clear description of how the buyer removes names, email addresses, phone numbers, and any other detail that could single out an individual. The usual method replaces identifiers with stable placeholders such as "employee 632" and then destroys the key that links the placeholder to the real person.

The buyer should be able to give you a short sample of the cleaned data together with a brief overview of the tools and human-review steps they employ. The sample must be fully de-identified before you look at it. If the buyer cannot provide that, request that de-identification be handled by a third-party service, a service we also offer as a separate project (de-identification).

Understand the licensing terms

The buyer will license the data, not buy it outright. Licenses typically involve a one-time payment and grant the buyer perpetual use rights for the models they train, because a trained model cannot return the original data.

Ask for a draft license that spells out:

• the scope of use (for example training large-language models or building reinforcement-learning environments);
• any exclusivity window, which is usually about 24 months but can be shortened for a lower price; and
• the payment structure and any options for future refreshes.

Make sure the agreement explicitly states that you retain ownership of the data and can continue to use it internally.

Use our free fit check

If you have worked through the points above and still want a neutral opinion, run our free fit check. The questionnaire asks only for basic information about your company size, the type of data you generate, and the industry you serve. No data leaves your premises at this stage.

You can see how a deal runs step by step on our how-it-works page, and the fit check itself is described on the sell page. When you are ready, click the button below to start the fit check. If you qualify, we will prepare a one-page summary of your answers and share it with a handful of vetted AI labs. From there you can compare offers and choose the terms that fit your business best.