Mercor's $10B AI Empire Runs on Robot Interviews and Surveillance
AI training company Mercor uses an AI interviewer and invasive monitoring software to manage its 30,000+ workers.
Mercor, the AI training company now valued at $10 billion as of 2025, has built a workforce management machine that's equal parts impressive and unsettling.
The company deploys an AI interviewer called Melvin to screen candidates and uses Insightful — invasive monitoring software — to keep tabs on its 30,000-plus workers. That's right: an AI company training AI, managed by AI, surveilled by software.
The setup reveals the strange reality behind the AI boom's labor pipeline. Tens of thousands of humans are needed to train the models, but the company treats workforce management itself as an automation problem.
The investigation, a joint effort between The Verge and New York Magazine, paints a picture of a company that has scaled aggressively while leaning hard into algorithmic control over the very people teaching its systems to think.