Verb, a data exchange, is launching a marketplace Thursday that lets consumers sell their personal data directly to companies, the company first shared with Axios.Why it matters: AI companies have spent years buying — or just scraping — datasets from publishers, app developers and data brokers. Verb is betting consumers will want a cut for themselves. What they're saying: Verb is the place that people "will go to monetize something that for decades we've given away for free," Cyrus Beschloss, Verb's CEO and co-founder, told Axios. Beschloss argues the marketplace could create "a completely new asset class," though previous attempts to pay consumers directly for personal data have struggled to gain traction.AI labs are expected to be the biggest buyers, Beschloss said, because they require vast amounts of data to be able to train upcoming models. How it works: Users add the Verb tracker to their phone and it starts collecting selected activity, including shopping habits and social media use.You can toggle off any categories of data you don't want collected, like search activity, for example. The more you share, the more you can charge. You set the price for your data, but Verb will provide an estimate based on what you share. Then any company can buy that data, though users can also select certain companies they don't want to sell their data to. Reality check: Privacy concerns abound with this marketplace. Verb says it excludes certain categories from analysis, including passwords, text messages and health data. Beschloss acknowledged the risks of data breaches and said the platform was designed with those threats in mind.'"If we can't tell users that their data is safe, then we are not a company... and we don't deserve to be if we can't do that," Beschloss said.Zoom out: Companies already spend billions collecting, licensing and buying consumer data from apps, advertisers and data brokers, but consumers themselves rarely participate in those transactions or receive any payment.Verb's pitch is that AI demand creates an opportunity to move consumers into the middle of that market — as the sellers instead of simply the product.As AI companies search for fresh, high-quality data to train future models, proprietary behavioral data may become more valuable than the web data many models have already consumed.Zoom in: The exchange of personal data and privacy for access to technology is already common practice in the tech world. Mercor helps AI companies hire humans to create new training data or evaluate model outputs based on their expertise.Meta on Wednesday released a coding agent with prices that drop significantly if you let the company train its models on your work.A startup called Vana — spun out from MIT — asks users to pool their own data with others and then collectively decide what companies can train on it.The bottom line: Verb's bet is that consumers will prefer getting paid directly for the data they generate instead of giving it away implicitly.