Mercor AI Safety Fund Grants

ABOUT MERCOR Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work. Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies: helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.   Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices. Mercor Safety Research Grants $5M One of the biggest challenges the industry faces today is addressing whether frontier AI is safe enough to deploy. A model can pass safety checks and still act differently in production. This is why investing today in safety research, evals and verification is critical. Mercor is committing $5 million to fund safety research. Award size and mix depend on the project. The grant supports: - Researcher hours - API costs - Stipends for event and conference attendance - The time of experts from Mercor's platform This is separate from the Mercor Research Fellowship, which funds benchmark and economics work. You can apply to that HERE https://www.mercor.com/careers/?ashby_jid=e1f6792d-1aae-4c2e-8edb-e2b91343dbb5. What we're looking for We're open to proposals across the full range of safety interests. We're particularly interested in: - Misalignment: deceptive alignment, goal misgeneralization, reward hacking, scheming, and situationally-aware failure modes - Sandbox escape: containment failures, privilege escalation, tool misuse, and agents operating outside their intended scope - Evaluation awareness: models detecting they are being tested and behaving differently under observation than in deployment - Interpretability: understanding what models are actually doing internally, and whether that can be made legible to a human reviewer - Oversight and control: scalable supervision, human-in-the-loop reliability, and what breaks when the system is more capable than its reviewer - Red-teaming methodology: more robust systems for uncovering novel failures If your work doesn't fit neatly into these, apply anyway. Strong proposals outside this list are welcome. Why us - Funding for researcher time, API costs, and event attendance - Where useful to the work: access to Mercor's expert network for human grading, red-teaming, and annotation: lawyers, accountants, engineers, scientists, clinicians - Access to Mercor's internal evaluation infrastructure, subject to review - Introductions to Mercor's network of researchers across frontier labs and academia Who should apply - Researchers at universities and non-profit research organizations, as well as public benefit corporations and small startups that do not sell AI training data. Awards are made to the researcher’s institution. - People with a specific, well-scoped question: the grant is built around your proposal, not a generic research rotation - Applicants based in the United States or the United Kingdom - Background in ML, CS, statistics, or an adjacent field (measurement, psychometrics, HCI, security, social science) - Bonus: experience with agentic evaluation, RL environments, adversarial ML, or systems security We expect grantees to publish. A paper, an open dataset, a public methodology, or a tool the field can use, released under an open license that permits commercial use. Award terms Selected grantees will sign Mercor’s research award agreement. Key terms include: - Grantees keep ownership of their work and grant Mercor a non-exclusive license to use it, including commercially. - Mercor may identify grantees and their institutions as award recipients, including by name and logo. Grantees may use Mercor’s logo with Mercor’s approval. - For benchmark and evaluation projects, Mercor receives early access to the benchmark before public release and the exclusive right to build and host a private held-out test set, at Mercor’s cost. - Grantees agree not to work with specified Mercor competitors on substantially similar benchmarks or evaluations during the award and for 12 months afterward. - Grantees are free to publish their findings. Mercor reviews drafts in advance only to remove its confidential information. - Awards are subject to tax documentation, sanctions screening, and periodic progress reports. How to apply Submit an Expression of Interest. We expect