Handshake AI offers up to $30,000 for proprietary work documents

Handshake AI announced a program to purchase high-quality professional documents from individuals in fields like consulting, finance, legal, software engineering and data science. Contributors can earn $6 per page, with a ceiling of $30,000 for up to 50 documents, each no longer than 100 pages, provided the files are accepted by the company. The role is described as a non-traditional, one-time submission that may lead to future projects.

Only text-based files such as Word documents or PDFs are eligible, while presentations are generally excluded. The company requires contributors to own the documents and have authority to share them, prompting data-privacy partner Thomas Ahlering of King & Spalding to question ownership, potential copyright issues, and the verification process. Handshake AI did not respond to inquiries about how it confirms document rights or whether the data will train its own models or be transferred elsewhere.