RWS in trouble? Is the AI bubble about to burst? November 2, 2025
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Random musings.trackback
This interesting blog post at Loekalization.com entitled The Collapse of RWS: Facts, Cash, and the Cost of Evasion was shared on the German language payment list Zahlungspraxis today. Apparently RWS is not paying its contractors.
In summary, this quote caught my attention:
"In translation, every delay has a human face. Freelancers waiting on overdue payments don’t see “working capital adjustments.” They see rent, food, and obligations. Yet what’s happening at RWS is textbook finance: the AI data economy’s dirty secret.
Clients (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) stretch payment terms from 30 days to 60 or 90. RWS promises freelancers 14. That 46-to-76-day gap must be financed by someone’s cash. When revenue stalls, that someone isn’t the company: it’s the people at the bottom of the chain.
And this isn’t just RWS’s problem; it’s the gig economy in microcosm. For years, major vendors built their empires on short-term labor and long-term promises. Now, as AI hype cools and corporate budgets tighten, the middlemen are suffocating. The collapse of RWS’s TrainAI payment pipeline isn’t an isolated failure: it’s the sound of an entire sector hitting its liquidity limit."
Interesting developments that probably surprise none of us.
Musings from an overworked translator 
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