Executive Summary

Key Numbers

Four numbers are below. Only the first is a figure this letter disclosed; the other three are what had accumulated in Kenya before the letter went out. The letter says the company paid "at high living wages and benefits," and the second card is the number that sits beside that sentence.

Source: TIME, "Former Meta and OpenAI Contractor Sama Liquidates, Citing Lawsuits" (November 9, 2026) and Wikipedia, "Sama (company)".

The process by which the company disappears began on October 23. That day Samasource Impact Sourcing, Inc. handed what assets remained to a new entity called Sama ABC. The letter introduces that entity as one run by people who specialize in winding down distressed and insolvent businesses, and states flatly that despite the similar name the two are unrelated as legal entities. Once the assets have been taken in and settled, no company called Sama is left on the books.

The letter that reached creditors on November 6 is what made those books public. As of October, assets stood at about $1 million and debt at $17 million. The figures carry a note that they are unaudited, and the date of the letter sits nearly a month away from the date of the balance sheet. The direction is plain all the same. What is owed is seventeen times what is left. A bank also holds a priority claim over substantially all of the assets, which leaves little for the unsecured creditors ranked behind it.

In the letter's own words, the company wound down because of "declining revenues due to increased competition that was compounded by recent class action litigation that would have required significant resources and years to defend successfully." That sentence names no case. Which suit it means, and what becomes of that suit now, the letter does not say.

The books are not the only thing the letter sets down. It says Sama leaves behind a reputation as one of the earliest advocates of impact sourcing, and that a model of deliberately recruiting from marginalized communities in East Africa brought life skills, technical training and digital work to more than 70,000 people. That headcount is the company's own phrasing and has not been checked from outside. The words it attaches to the jobs are "at high living wages and benefits." The take-home pay of the same company's Kenyan workers, $1.32 to $2 an hour depending on seniority and performance, comes from TIME's January 2023 investigation.

It starts in 2008. Leila Janah founded a nonprofit called Samasource and gave the model a name, impact sourcing. The design was that data work, broken into small enough pieces and handed to low-income workers in Kenya, Uganda and India, needs only basic English and a short course to begin, and that the wage then becomes a ladder out of poverty. Janah drew the model from a stint at a call center in Mumbai and from time spent in Africa.

In 2019 the organization was restructured as the for-profit Sama, with the original nonprofit staying on as its largest shareholder. In January of the following year Janah died of a rare soft-tissue cancer at thirty-seven, and Wendy Gonzalez, the chief operating officer, took over as chief executive and holds the job still. Over those years the client list came to include automotive and navigation, augmented reality and biotech companies, along with Meta and OpenAI. Meta sent content moderation and smart glasses data. OpenAI sent the classification of harmful content for ChatGPT training.

Two TIME investigations are where that back end became visible from outside. The February 2022 piece covered the Facebook moderation center in Nairobi. People recruited across Africa in the belief that they were taking call center jobs learned what the work actually was only after signing and moving to Nairobi. The January 2023 piece was about the OpenAI side. Kenyan workers read and classified harmful content for ChatGPT training, and take-home pay ran between $1.32 and $2 an hour depending on seniority and performance. One worker quoted in that story called the job torture. Fairwork, which rates labor conditions, scored the company 5 out of 10.

The company left this work early. The OpenAI contract stopped in February 2022 after the Kenyan team objected to requests that were not in the agreement, and the final batch of data went out in March, eight months ahead of schedule. On January 10, 2023 the company announced it would drop all remaining work involving sensitive content, and finished that exit in March of the same year. The company now being liquidated had left this line of business three years earlier.

The collapse is packed into a single year, 2026. On March 5 Ars Technica carried accounts from Sama workers who said that while screening footage shot on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses they had seen people using the bathroom and people having sex. In April Meta ended a data contract that had run for nearly seven years. Meta said the photos and videos are users' private material and that human review is part of product improvement users consent to, and added, "We've also decided to end our work with Sama because they don't meet our standards." On the sixteenth of the same month, a layoff of 1,108 Nairobi staff was announced.

In August, plaintiffs in a US privacy class action over the smart glasses voluntarily dropped their claims against Sama. On September 15 the company formally ended its Kenya and Uganda operations. The Nairobi and Kampala offices closed, finishing nearly a decade in East Africa. Then the assets moved on October 23, and the letter to creditors went out on November 6.

The contract ending and the layoff fall in the same April, but the footage story, the East Africa exit, the asset transfer and the notice to creditors are separate decisions at separate moments. Coverage tends to bundle all of it into one. The last two became public through TIME on November 9.

Daniel Motaung was a worker moderating Meta content in Nairobi. He was dismissed in 2019 after trying to organize a strike with colleagues. In March 2022 his lawyers sent Meta and Sama a demand letter listing twelve demands with a twenty-one-day deadline: comply with Kenyan labor, data protection and health law, give staff proper medical care and insurance, raise pay, and the like. When no answer came, he filed suit in a Kenyan court on May 10. The claim runs along three lines: wages that fell as low as $1.50 an hour, conduct that blocked the formation of a union, and the collective trauma the moderation work left behind. Recent coverage describes the case as one litigating forced labor and human trafficking, and the violation of constitutional rights to freedom of association, dignity and fair labor practices.

In 2023 former moderators filed a separate suit claiming unfair dismissal and blacklisting, and that case was consolidated with Motaung's. A union of African content moderators was formed in the same current. What stands before the Kenyan court has grown from one person's dispute into a case with former moderators attached to it.

The argument that ran longest in court was whether there could be a trial at all. Meta argued that it is a US and Irish entity, not registered in Kenya, and that a Kenyan court therefore has no jurisdiction. On February 6, 2023 the Employment and Labour Relations Court declined to accept that. Since Meta earns revenue selling products in Kenya, the court held, it is a proper party. Meta appealed on the twenty-first of that month, and the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal on September 20, 2024. Then on February 12, 2026 the court postponed judgment in Motaung's case and in the one brought by the former moderators together. The trial on the merits had still not begun.

A distinction between names becomes necessary here. The entity that sent the liquidation letter is Samasource Impact Sourcing, Inc., registered in the United States, and the name entered as defendant in the Kenyan court record is Samasource Kenya EPZ Limited. Both trade as Sama, but they are separately registered entities. Neither the TIME report nor the creditor letter says what happens to the Kenyan company. Both sides have also spoken outside court. Sama has maintained that it complied with Kenyan labor law, and Meta has denied responsibility for the working conditions. In August 2023, though, chief executive Wendy Gonzalez said of the decision to take on the Facebook moderation work that, knowing what she knows now, she would not have signed that contract.

The liquidation letter gives litigation costs as a reason for closing, and still does not call this case by name. Nor does it explain whether any assets would remain to pay damages if the claimants win. Set against a balance sheet of $1 million in assets and $17 million in debt, the answer suggests itself. Four and a half years after the suit was filed, one defendant has entered a wind-down and the claimants are still in court.

The work of making data has not shrunk. Randstad Digital's 2026 labor market analysis counts job postings for "AI trainer" and data annotation roles rising 281% between 2021 and 2026, the fastest-growing single occupation among technical roles. Demand has moved toward people who supervise models and check their safety.

What changed is who the work goes to. Mercor gathers contractors who have worked in investment banking, law firms and hospitals, and connects them to clients such as OpenAI. Surge AI built its business as a managed marketplace centered on vetted experts rather than millions of anonymous crowd workers. Both pay high rates to small numbers of people. The market reports that put outsourcing vendors at 69% of revenue are describing 2024. How much the expert-centered model has taken since then has not been counted again on the same basis.

Sama's business sat on the other side of this current. It handed high volume at low rates to many workers in poor regions, and for more than fifteen years that was the company's advantage. The company itself gave only competition as its reason and never said its model had aged. Joining those two facts is this article's reading.

Sama did, though, walk away from moderation work on its own in 2023, and Gonzalez said at the time that the work was about 4% of revenue. What went wrong in the contract Meta ended in 2026 was glasses footage, not moderation. So the fall of this company cannot be written as the obsolescence of a low-wage model in one line. What is clear is the order. The books emptied after organizing cheap labor in large numbers had stopped being enough to hold a company up on its own.

If data quality is measured only by model performance, this is news about another company shutting down. But follow training data back toward where it came from, and a person is standing at the end of it. Whether a single label is correct is not separable from the instructions the person who attached it was given, how many items a day they had to get through, and how many months they could stand the job. Working conditions are a quality variable before they are an ethical question.

When a supplier disappears, something else is at stake. Training data built on outsourced work years ago is still inside the models, and the record of who made it under what conditions is lost along with the company. What survives the end of a contract is not the dataset itself but the provenance attached to it.

Three questions can be put to your own organization. For the training data in use now, can you confirm from a contract or a document who attached the labels and what instructions they worked from? If the supplier changes or shuts down, does that provenance stay on your side? Are the rate and the hours that went into a batch of labels written down anywhere? If any one of the three is blank, the conditions the data was made under leave with the supplier's books.

Thank you for reading this far. The course of the liquidation is in TIME's report, and the company's fifteen years are in the English Wikipedia entry. Who made the training data you use, and where is that written down today?

Primary Reporting

• 1.Perrigo, B. (2026, November 9). "Exclusive: Former Meta and OpenAI Contractor Sama Liquidates, Citing Lawsuits." TIME.
• 2.Perrigo, B. (2023, January 18). "Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic." TIME.
• 3.Perrigo, B. (2022, February 14). "Inside Facebook's African Sweatshop." TIME.
• 4.Ars Technica. (2026, March 5). "Workers report watching Ray-Ban Meta-shot footage of people using the bathroom."
• 5.Business Daily Africa. (2026, April 16). "Sama to lay off 1,108 Nairobi staff after Meta ends deal."

Legal

• 6.conflictoflaws.net. (2026). "Jurisdiction over Meta Inc. in Kenyan Courts: Three Ongoing Lawsuits."

Background

• 7.Wikipedia contributors. "Sama (company)." Wikipedia.
• 8.Wikipedia contributors. "Mercor." Wikipedia.
• 9.Wikipedia contributors. "Surge AI." Wikipedia.

Industry Data

• 10.Randstad Digital. (2026). "Top 10 High-Demand AI Tech Jobs & Hiring Trends."