Verb innovates AI data economy by enabling consumers to sell personal information directly

Verb has launched a marketplace allowing individuals to monetise their personal data by selling access to selected activities, signalling a shift towards user-controlled data exchange amid rising tensions over privacy and AI training needs.

Verb is betting that the next valuable commodity in artificial intelligence will not be code or compute but ordinary people’s behaviour. The data exchange company has launched a marketplace that lets consumers sell access to their personal information directly to companies, including AI developers seeking material for model training, according to Axios and TechRepublic.

The pitch is straightforward: instead of platforms and brokers quietly profiting from user data, individuals would choose what to share and set a price themselves. Subscribers install a tracker on their phones that records selected activities such as shopping patterns and social media use. They can switch off categories they do not want included, and Verb says the more information a person shares, the more they may earn. Sellers also get a price estimate from the company and can block specific buyers.

Cyrus Beschloss, Verb’s chief executive and co-founder, told Axios that the company sees this as a chance to monetise something people have handed over for free for years. He argued that AI labs will be among the largest customers because model development depends on huge volumes of training data. That makes the marketplace part of a broader race to secure lawful, usable data at scale, as AI firms face growing pressure over how they source the material that feeds their systems.

The idea is not entirely without precedent. Veritone has launched a data marketplace aimed at connecting rights-cleared data suppliers with AI developers, while Versos AI is marketing tools for structuring and licensing video libraries for training use. Microsoft has also moved to create a publisher content marketplace as news organisations push for compensation when their work is used in AI systems. Together, these efforts point to a market in which data licensing is becoming more formal, more targeted and more commercialised.

Still, the model carries obvious tensions. Verb says it excludes sensitive categories such as passwords, text messages and health data, and Beschloss has said security was central to the platform’s design. Even so, a system built around trading personal information will have to persuade users that the financial upside is worth the privacy risk. That remains the central question: whether consumers will see their data as an asset to be sold, or as something that should stay off the market altogether.