Mercor AI Capabilities 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 AI Capability Research Grants $5M One of the biggest challenges facing the industry today is determining whether frontier AI is capable enough to deliver value in real-world settings. A model can perform well on benchmarks and still struggle in production. That’s why investing in capabilities research, realistic evaluations, and robust verification is critical. Mercor is committing $5 million to fund AI capabilities research. The grant supports: - The time of experts from Mercor's platform - Researcher hours - API credits - Stipends for event and conference attendance This is separate from the Mercor Research Fellowship, which funds individual experts (apply HERE https://www.mercor.com/careers/a0a98be0-d856-4129-b500-c0a3e412ef01/) and our $5m of safety funding awards (apply HERE https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/1d59ce50-4207-4d95-b7fd-5a01e90b0897). What we're looking for - Real-world evaluations: measuring whether benchmark performance translates into reliable performance on realistic tasks and workflows - Environments: building high-fidelity, interactive environments that capture the complexity of real-world work - Long-horizon tasks: evaluating and improving models’ ability to plan, execute, and adapt across extended workflows - Agentic capabilities: tool use, coordination, memory, and autonomous execution - Reasoning and problem-solving: improving performance on complex, ambiguous, or underspecified tasks - Post-training: developing better data, rewards, and training methods to improve model capabilities - Evaluation methodology: creating more robust measures of capability, reliability, and real-world utility Why us - Funding for autonomous frontier-work. - Access to Mercor's expert network for human grading 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 - Academic groups, independent researchers, and non-profit organizations - People with a specific, well-scoped question: the grant is built around your proposal, not a generic research rotation - Bonus: researchers with experience with agentic evaluation, RL environments, and post-training. We expect grantees to publish – such as a paper, an open dataset, a public methodology, or a tool the field can use. How to apply Submit an Expression of Interest. We expect to see a one- or two-page document. It should contain at least a section on your team, background, and research accomplishments; a section on your proposed research project; and a section on the outputs and impact of the project, with directionally correct timelines and resource requirements.