Mercor AI Safety Fund Grants

Mercor • London, California

7d • Onsite

About The Position

Mercor is committing $5 million to fund safety research. The grant supports researcher hours, API credits, stipends for event and conference attendance, and the time of experts from Mercor's platform. This is separate from the Mercor Research Fellowship, which funds benchmark and economics work. We are open to proposals across the full range of safety interests, particularly in misalignment, sandbox escape, evaluation awareness, interpretability, oversight and control, and red-teaming methodology. We encourage strong proposals outside these areas as well. Grantees will be expected to publish their findings in the form of a paper, an open dataset, a public methodology, or a tool for the field.

Requirements

• Independent researchers, academics, PhD students, and small teams.
• A specific, well-scoped research question.
• Background in ML, CS, statistics, or an adjacent field (measurement, psychometrics, HCI, security, social science).

Nice To Haves

• Experience with agentic evaluation, RL environments, adversarial ML, or systems security.

Responsibilities

• Conduct safety research related to frontier AI.
• Address challenges in AI safety, including misalignment, sandbox escape, evaluation awareness, interpretability, oversight and control, and red-teaming methodology.
• Publish research findings (paper, open dataset, public methodology, or tool).

Benefits

• Funding for researcher time
• API credits
• Stipends for event and conference 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

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree