Why an AI company cleaned my New York City apartment for free

AI firm Micro AGI is dispatching camera-equipped cleaners to New York City apartments at no charge, collecting in-home video to train future cooking and cleaning robots, the company confirmed [1]. The initiative, called Shift, outfits workers with cameras on their caps wired to mobile phones, recording every movement as they scrub counters and prepare meals [1]. Founder Bercan Kilic said the goal is "to advance humanity" by teaching machines to handle the endless variation of real-world kitchens and tools [1]. The company currently cleans roughly five apartments a day, five days a week, and also has mechanics fixing cars in Turkey [1]. Kilic acknowledged the project requires "tonnes" of data because lighting, objects, and layouts change constantly [1]. The business model depends on selling anonymized datasets to robotics and other AI firms [1]. The push arrives as investment in artificial intelligence has boomed in the 2020s, fueled by the rapid scaling of large language models such as ChatGPT and the transformer architecture introduced in 2017 [5]. Privacy advocates immediately pushed back. Calli Schroeder, director of the AI and human rights programme at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the service "a diabolically creative way to sell privacy invasion" and warned that people "wildly underestimate the level of sensitive information that in-home recordings would pick up" [1]. Rory Mir of the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted a "concerning increase in 'pay-for-privacy' and 'data-bribing' practices" and cautioned that shared data can be passed to other businesses or governments [1]. Kilic countered that Shift is "the most honest platform by far regarding what happens to your data," adding, "we don't expect everyone to like it" [1]. The debate echoes long-running tensions over data collection in private spaces, reminiscent of controversies that have trailed platforms such as Airbnb, which built a global marketplace by inserting itself into millions of homes [3]. It also unfolds in a New York City that recently elected Democratic state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani as mayor in November 2025, a race that drew the highest turnout since 1993 [2].