Sell your company's CAD drawings to AI

Drawings show how a building, a part or a plant was designed, revised and built. AI companies want the native files with every revision, next to the specs, calculations and emails that explain them. Telegraph shows a $450K payout to a 70-person engineering firm for “CAD drawings, calculations, technical reports, revisions, and project specifications”, its own example. Handshake AI names AutoCAD among the sources it buys, and Maryah takes design files, parts and assemblies.

On Grepped’s marketplace, drawings sell inside whole company archives. Two of its listings: “Copper processing plant engineering: 73,000+ native DWG drawings and project records” and “German CNC precision manufacturer: 24K NC programs, drawings, 3D models and 20+ years of email”.

Mercor Data wants the native vault, feature trees included

Mercor Data publishes a listing for hardware engineering companies of 20 to 2,000 people: automotive suppliers, aerospace, robotics, industrial equipment, product design consultancies, EV and drone makers. It wants full multi-part assemblies in native CAD with their feature trees rather than exported meshes alone, together with circuit board designs, drawings and the test results that go with them, across several product generations. PCB designs and Gerber files, bills of materials, firmware, FEA and CFD simulation files and measured test results add to the amount. Single parts, parts catalogs and designs your customers own are not a fit. Mercor’s range is $45K to $1.35M, depending on assembly count and completeness, and it names SolidWorks PDM, PTC Creo, Siemens NX, Autodesk Fusion, Onshape, Altium, KiCad and ANSYS.

Its construction listing takes drawings differently: as part of a completed project’s record, with the specs, RFIs, submittals, change orders, daily logs and site imagery, from builders and design firms of 50 to 2,000 people, in Procore, Autodesk Construction Cloud, Revit, AutoCAD and Bluebeam. The construction page has both listings in full.

Autodesk’s terms leave the files yours

Autodesk’s December 2025 terms update says “you own your content”. Its limits on data mining “apply to Autodesk content and content we license, not to customer or developer content.” So Autodesk’s terms don’t stop you licensing a copy of your own drawings. Your client contracts might.

Export from BIM 360 by the folder

In Document Management, click Folders, select one or more folders and choose Download source file. Every folder and file inside comes down as one .zip. Each download is capped at 20GB in total, so take a large project in parts. Windows’ built-in unzip tool can fail on files of 4GB or more; use another tool for those.

Revit Cloud Models published after June 25, 2025 no longer bring their linked files along by default. Download each host model on its own and pick the option that includes its linked files.

Get the whole vault from Autodesk Vault

Files in a vault can’t be edited in place. When you get them, Vault copies them to a local working folder, by default My Documents\Vault. Get every project to the working folder, then copy that folder with its structure intact, so each drawing stays with its project. Mercor Data wants the feature history that comes with the native files, so take the native formats, not exports.

Drawings on a shared drive need no export. Copy them with their folders, and keep the project names.

What to take out

• Client drawings. Work you drew for a client may belong to the client under your contract. Check each project before it goes in. Mercor Data’s hardware listing asks outright whether you or your customers own the designs.
• Stamped and sealed sheets. They carry an engineer’s or architect’s seal and signature. Ask each company how it removes them.
• Secure sites. Drawings of plants, utilities or other sites with security limits in the contract.
• Licensed content. Manufacturer blocks, Revit families and title blocks from others have their own terms.

Drawings are worth more next to the records around them. See company drives and business email.