Meta suspends collaboration with Mercor after data breach compromises AI industry secrets

Meta has suspended all cooperation with data processing company Mercor while it investigates a major security breach that impacted the startup, two sources confirmed to WIRED. The break is indefinite, the sources said. Other major AI labs are also reassessing their collaboration with Mercor to assess the extent of the incident, people familiar with the matter say.

Mercor is one of the few companies that OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI labs rely on to generate training data for their models. The company employs vast networks of human contractors to create customized, proprietary data sets for these labs, which are typically kept top secret because they are a central part of the recipe for generating valuable AI models that power products like ChatGPT and Claude Code. AI labs are sensitive to this data because it can reveal important details to competitors – including other AI labs in the US and China – about how they train AI models. It is currently unclear whether the disclosed data in…