A billion-dollar AI data company Mercor faces at least 7 class-action lawsuits, accused of monitoring computers and leaking facial data

According to Beating Monitoring, AI data annotation outsourcing company Mercor has been sued in at least 7 class-action lawsuits in recent weeks due to third-party data leaks. Mercor is headquartered in San Francisco, valued at $10 billion, with clients including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. Its core business is hiring outsourced personnel to provide feedback data for AI training. The leaked content includes video interviews of outsourced workers, facial biometric data, and computer screenshots.

The class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Northern California accuses Mercor of collecting background check data of job applicants and sharing it with partners, violating federal regulations. The plaintiffs also allege that Mercor monitors outsourced workers’ computers and shares data with clients, trains AI models using video interviews, and uses materials that may belong to other companies to train client models. Mercor denies these allegations, stating that the company complies with all relevant regulations and has hired third-party forensic experts to investigate the leak.

One of the plaintiffs, former Goldman Sachs employee David Bevvino-Berv, said he saw financial models and prompts containing institutional data terminal tags, real trading counterparty names, and other features during his time at Mercor, suspecting they came from proprietary information of other companies. Another plaintiff, Thitipun Srinarmwong, said the project manager encouraged workers to use real data from their jobs, requiring only data masking. When he wrote vaguely to protect confidential information, the reviewer criticized the content as “too short and too vague.”

Mercor required outsourced personnel to install screenshot software Insightful, which workers said could take screenshots every minute. Bevvino-Berv stated that Insightful captured screens from about 240 applications, including his bank account and health insurance portal, without prior notice that the screenshot scope would extend beyond Mercor-related work. Meta has suspended cooperation with Mercor and launched an investigation. Mercor employed 30k outsourced workers in 2025.