{"id":380749,"date":"2026-04-03T23:38:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T23:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/380749\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T23:38:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T23:38:07","slug":"ai-training-data-giant-mercor-is-reportedly-looking-to-buy-the-work-you-did-at-your-old-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/380749\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Training Data Giant Mercor Is Reportedly Looking to Buy the Work You Did at Your Old Job"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you feel like your previous employer didn\u2019t properly compensate you, there might be a way to cash in on that work\u2014though it seems legally (and, depending on how you feel about artificial intelligence, morally) dubious. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal<\/a>, AI training data giant Mercor is offering people payment in exchange for selling their prior work materials.<\/p>\n

Per the report<\/a>, Mercor has been poking around a number of industries, including the entertainment space, and asking professionals if they\u2019d be willing to sell stuff from previous jobs. Visual effects artists told the Journal that Mercor asked for production work like \u201c4D physics scenes with camera data, depth and motion\/point tracking\u201d\u2014the kind of material that is specific to an industry and would be very difficult for the average person to get their hands on.<\/p>\n

It\u2019ll probably be difficult for Mercor to get their hands on, too. As the WSJ pointed out<\/a>, a lot of what the AI training data company is asking for likely belongs to the employer for whom the work was initially done. The employees and contractors who have worked on these types of domain-specific projects are usually subject to any number of contracts that prevent them from sharing information related to their work. Much of it is likely covered by intellectual property laws, and the workers themselves are often made to sign confidentiality agreements.<\/p>\n

While the company said in a statement to the Journal that Mercor \u201cdoes not buy intellectual property,\u201d the outlet also said that messages sent by Mercor to employers regarding their previous work did include the phrase \u201clooking to purchase.\u201d Mercor could plausibly claim that it isn\u2019t specifically seeking IP in these requests, but it does seem like an inevitable outcome of such purchases.<\/p>\n

Mercor has made a name for itself by shelling out for domain expertise, paying people (often ones who have lost work<\/a>) with specific job and industry knowledge to train AI models. But anyone considering trying to cash in on some prior work material on the down low should probably proceed with caution if they\u2019re expecting any protection from Mercor.<\/p>\n

The company just recently suffered what seems to be a massive data breach<\/a>, with as much as 4TB worth of sensitive data falling into the hands of hackers. According to the group that claimed responsibility for the breach, the stolen data includes candidate profiles, personally identifiable information, and employer data. Pretty much the exact kind of stuff you wouldn\u2019t want to be made public if you were slyly selling protected material.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you feel like your previous employer didn\u2019t properly compensate you, there might be a way to cash…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":380750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,5696,15918,218,219,61,60,3682,17846,11457,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-380749","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-models","10":"tag-ai-training","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-large-language-model","16":"tag-llms","17":"tag-mercor","18":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/380750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}