Meta Pauses Work With Mercor After Data Breach Puts AI Industry Secrets at Risk

Maxwell Zeff, Zoë Schiffer, and Lily Hay Newman report: Meta has paused all its work with the data contracting firm Mercor while it investigates a major security breach that impacted the startup, two sources confirmed to WIRED. The pause is indefinite, the sources said. Other major AI labs are also reevaluating their work with Mercor as they assess the scope of the incident, according to people familiar with the matter. Mercor is one of a few firms that OpenAI , Anthropic , and other AI labs rely on to generate training data for their models. The company hires massive networks of human contractors to generate bespoke, proprietary datasets for these labs, which are typically kept highly secret as they’re a core ingredient in the recipe to generate valuable AI models that power products like ChatGPT and Claude Code . AI labs are sensitive about this data because it can reveal to competitors—including other AI labs in America and China—key details about the ways they train AI models. It’s unclear at this time whether the data exposed in Mercor’s breach would meaningfully help a competitor. Read more at WIRED . Category: Artificial Intelligence Business Sector Subcontractor