Mercor is committing $5 million to fund safety research. The grant supports:

• Researcher hours
• API credits
• 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.

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 credits, 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

• Independent researchers, academics, PhD students, and small teams
• People with a specific, well-scoped question: the grant is built around your proposal, not a generic research rotation
• 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.

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.