Mercorās 60 Minutes moment puts the humans behind AI in the spotlight
The San Francisco startup pays a network of more than 100,000 freelance experts to teach AI models judgment, and it has grown into a $10 billion company doing it
Most people picture AI training as servers humming in a dark warehouse. Mercor would like you to picture a doctor at her kitchen table, grading a chatbot’s answer about drug interactions.
The San Francisco company got the 60 Minutes treatment in an October 4, 2026, segment. The episode focused on its network of more than 100,000 freelancers who use their professional expertise to make AI models smarter.
How the Mercor machine works
Mercor sits between the biggest AI labs and a large pool of skilled contractors. Its clients include OpenAI and Anthropic.
The freelancers come from fields ranging from medicine to finance. Their job is to give feedback that helps AI systems learn what a good answer actually looks like.
The technical term is reinforcement learning from human feedback, usually shortened to RLHF. Think of it as a very demanding tutor marking up a student’s essays, except the student is a language model and the essays never stop coming.
Mercor also supplies experts for model evaluations. These are structured tests that check whether a model’s output holds up to professional scrutiny before it reaches the public.
Not everyone in the network works every week. Roughly 30,000 contractors are active on a weekly basis, out of the 100,000-plus connected to the platform.
The pay is not gig-economy pocket change. Experts reportedly earn an average of $95 per hour, with rates running between $20 and $375 depending on specialty.
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Add it up and the numbers get large quickly. Daily payouts to contractors fall somewhere in the range of $1.5 million to $4 million.
From recruiting startup to $10 billion company
Mercor was founded in 2023 by Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha. It did not start out in the AI training business.
The company began as a startup that recruited programmers. It later pivoted into supplying human feedback for AI labs, which turned out to be a much bigger market.
The timing helped. Demand for expert feedback in AI training surged after the launch of ChatGPT, as labs raced to make their models more accurate and more useful in specialized fields.
Revenue climbed from roughly $1 million to hundreds of millions of dollars within two years.
Mercor reached a $10 billion valuation after closing a $350 million Series C round in October 2025. As of mid-2026, the company’s annualized revenue run rate is estimated at around $2 billion.
That growth made Foody a billionaire at 23.
In the 60 Minutes segment, Foody framed Mercor as the pioneer of a new kind of job. His argument is that these workers teach AI systems judgment and nuance, qualities that raw data alone cannot provide.
What this means for workers, labs, and investors
The most interesting tension in the Mercor story is a philosophical one. The company pays skilled professionals well to make AI better at the very tasks those professionals perform.
The 60 Minutes piece stirred debate among experts, with some celebrating the productivity revolution and others warning of potential job displacement amidst widespread AI adoption.