NEW YORK CITY — Shift, an AI training startup operated by German company MicroAGI, launched a free home cleaning service in New York City on May 28 that records first-person video of cleaners in exchange for labor. The service collects footage of tasks such as scrubbing dishes, wiping counters, dusting tables, and mopping floors to train embodied artificial intelligence systems.

The free cleaning appointments last two hours and require users to provide a phone number, email address, home address, and access instructions through the Shift app. In return, Shift records the cleaning process using wearable devices worn by its workers. The startup plans to expand the service to other cities, including London.

According to Shift’s app FAQ, names, faces, and other personally identifiable information are automatically anonymized and blurred before any data is used. Its privacy policy states that advanced machine learning models perform irreversible transformations—such as automated face blurring—directly on smart glasses or recording devices before data is uploaded to cloud servers.

Shift claims to have paid tens of thousands of people across 15 countries to record their activities through its app, contributing to a broader effort by MicroAGI to accelerate embodied AI development. The company began promoting the New York cleaning service on May 28 through social media posts featuring a video set to the song “Empire State of Mind.”

It is unclear whether users can request deletion of their home cleaning videos from Shift’s robot training datasets. There is also no public information confirming whether the anonymization techniques fully prevent identification of users’ homes in the training data.