Mercor AI Safety Fund Grants

The role

This grant funds safety research, evaluations, and verification. The funding supports researcher hours, API costs, event stipends, and expert time from Mercor's platform.

What you will do

• Conduct safety research based on a specific, well-scoped proposal
• Publish a paper, an open dataset, a public methodology, or a tool released under an open license

Required qualifications

• Researchers at universities, non-profit research organizations, public benefit corporations, or small startups that do not sell AI training data
• 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)
• Submit a one- or two-page Expression of Interest including team background, research project, and outputs/impact

Nice to have

• experience with agentic evaluation
• experience with RL environments
• experience with adversarial ML
• experience with systems security

Benefits

• Funding for researcher time
• Funding for API costs
• Funding for event attendance
• Access to Mercor's expert network for human grading, red-teaming, and annotation
• Access to Mercor's internal evaluation infrastructure, subject to review
• Introductions to Mercor's network of researchers across frontier labs and academia

Before you apply

• Awards are made to the researcher's institution
• Awards are subject to tax documentation, sanctions screening, and periodic progress reports
• Grantees must sign Mercor's research award agreement
• Grantees agree not to work with specified Mercor competitors on substantially similar benchmarks or evaluations during the award and for 12 months afterward

About the company

Mercor builds infrastructure that enables frontier AI labs and enterprises to train, evaluate, and improve AI on real-world professional work. The company is profitable and recently raised a $750 million Series D at a $20 billion valuation.