Mercor, Handshake, Micro1 buy work files for $350K to $1.8M

Mercor originally started as an AI recruiting company, but as the team got to know the players, it learned that the big labs were frustrated by the quality of data. The industry had been hiring experts to simulate actual workflow, but that didn't capture the messiness of an actual operating business. That gap helps explain why buyers are now turning to live corporate records rather than synthetic or simulated work.

Handshake tells WIRED that a big part of its business is buying graduate students' papers and coursework, while an entrepreneur described mail from a company named Sunset that helps startups wind down and brokers the data to labs. Micro1 CEO Ali Ansari says labs, enterprises, and robotics companies pay about $40 to $50 billion a year for data, a figure that could not be verified. He expects that to exceed a trillion dollars a year in the next two to four years.

Anthropic acknowledges a big market for data but told WIRED it doesn't buy workflow from live companies like WIRED; OpenAI didn't respond before publication. The Spirit Airlines bankruptcy sale, where a Google bid of $10 million was reportedly topped by Micro1 by $2.5 million before the sale was put on hold, shows how contested these deals can become when worker privacy is at stake.