Mercor AI Safety Fund Grants

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 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. Please do not include confidential or proprietary information in your Expression of Interest. Submitting an Expression of Interest does not obligate Mercor to make an award.