Own Your Data: Why AI Made It Surprisingly Valuable with Andrea Muttoni, CEO of the Data Foundation

Welcome to AI Trust But Verify, the podcast where Alec Crawford, founder and CEO of Verapath, talks with leaders in financial services and technology about putting AI to work safely, securely and responsibly. Each episode looks past the hype to how firms are actually using AI, and how they make sure they can trust the results.

Every company is sitting on data that AI labs want, and most of them don't know what it's worth. In this episode, Alec talks with Andrea Muttoni, CEO of the Data Foundation (formerly Story Protocol), about the fast-growing and largely opaque market for AI training data.

Andrea has worked on Kindle and Alexa at Amazon and at Dapper Labs, and has spent his career around intellectual property. He explains why AI labs now pay heavily for data they can't scrape from the internet, what a company's data is worth (Spirit Airlines' data sold for $10 million in bankruptcy, and he describes that as the floor), and why he believes every company will become a data company, whether it plans to or not.

In this episode:

1. AI has made your data valuable. AI labs pay for data they can't scrape from the internet. Andrea says Spirit Airlines' $10M bankruptcy data sale is the floor, and specialized data can bring in eight or nine figures.
2. Every company will become a data company, so own your data. Whether a company trains its own models or licenses data to others, its data becomes a new revenue line. For some companies it may become the only one. Decide on your own terms instead of giving the data away.
3. Provenance is largely solved, but attribution isn't. Tools like Trace can show where data came from. Once data goes into a model, though, there's no practical way to trace which data shaped a given output. That's the guardrail AI still lacks.
4. Smaller, specialized models are coming. Andrea compares today's frontier models to the mainframe era. As compute gets cheaper, he expects companies to train faster, cheaper models on their own data for specific tasks, and robotics to drive the next big wave of demand for data.
5. AI is speeding up cyber threats. "The world is turning into a red team." AI agents find and exploit vulnerabilities faster than companies can respond, as the PHP vulnerability he described shows, so the threat grows exponentially.

Mentioned in this episode

• The Data Foundation (formerly Story Protocol): datafdn.org
• Trace, the Data Foundation’s data provenance tool: trace.datafdn.org
• Poseidon, the AI data company incubated by the Data Foundation, and Numo, its app for contributing training data: Poseidon raises $15M (Blockworks)
• Google buys Spirit Airlines’ data for $10M in bankruptcy sale: Skift
• Andrea Muttoni on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/muttoni
• Andrea Muttoni on X: @devrelius

Find Andrea:

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/muttoni
• X: @devrelius
• Trace: trace.datafdn.org

© 2026 Artificial Intelligence Risk, Inc. All rights reserved.