Mercor, a multi-billion dollar AI data company, faces at least seven class-action lawsuits alleging it monitored computers and leaked facial data.

According to ME News, on April 23 (UTC+8), according to Beating's monitoring, Mercor, an AI data annotation outsourcing company, has been embroiled in at least seven class-action lawsuits in recent weeks due to a third-party data breach. Mercor, headquartered in San Francisco and valued at $10 billion, has clients including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. Its core business is hiring outsourced personnel to provide feedback data for AI training. The leaked data includes video interviews of outsourced personnel, facial biometric data, and computer screenshots. The class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday in Northern California accuses Mercor of collecting background check data on job applicants and sharing it with partners, violating federal regulations. The plaintiffs also accuse Mercor of monitoring outsourced personnel's computers and sharing the data with clients, using video interviews to train AI models, and using materials that may belong to other companies to train client models. Mercor denies the allegations, stating that the company complies with all relevant regulations and has hired third-party forensic experts to investigate the breach. One of the plaintiffs, former Goldman Sachs employee David Bevvino-Berv, claims that while working at Mercor, he saw financial models and prompts containing features such as institutional data terminal markers and real counterparty names, suspecting they were proprietary information from other companies. Another plaintiff, Thitipun Srinarmwong, claims that a project manager encouraged workers to use real data from their own jobs, requiring only anonymization. When he wrote vaguely to protect confidential information, reviewers criticized the content as "too short and too ambiguous." Mercor required outsourced workers to install the screenshot software Insightful, which the outsourced workers claimed could take screenshots every minute. Bevvino-Berv claims that Insightful captured screenshots of approximately 240 applications, including his bank account and health insurance portal, without his prior knowledge that the screenshot scope would extend beyond his Mercor-related work. Meta has suspended its cooperation with Mercor and launched an investigation. Mercor employs 30,000 outsourced workers by 2025. (Source: ME)