“Attention is all you need” is true not only for models but also the humans on the other side of the message. Most AI tools still treat the recipient’s attention as unlimited.

Mercor is committing $5M to a new AI Safety Fund. One of the biggest challenges the industry faces today is addressing whether frontier AI is safe enough to deploy. This is why we believe investing today in safety research, evals, and verification is critical. We want to work with AI researchers who are focused on critical safety risks, including: - Misalignment: deceptive alignment, reward hacking, scheming - Sandbox escape and agent containment failures - Evaluation awareness: models that behave differently when tested - Interpretability and scalable oversight - Red-teaming methodology and safety eval design We will fund the researcher hours, API credits, and travel. We will also cover the cost to work with our network of 5M+ experts red-teaming, grading and annotation, and free use of our evals and analysis platform. Grants are open to independent researchers, non-profits, and academics.