Mercor AI Research Fund Grants: Economics of AI

About the role

Mercor's AI Research Fund is offering grants for research on the economic impacts of AI, separate from its fellowship, safety and benchmarking funding tracks. Awards are made to the researcher's institution and cover expert time from Mercor's platform, researcher hours, API costs and conference stipends.

What you'll do

• Propose and run research measuring AI's effect on labor outcomes such as employment, wages and task composition
• Study human–AI collaboration, productivity gains and the "review cost" of checking model outputs
• Examine enterprise AI adoption and how to measure returns causally rather than by self-report
• Submit a 1–3 page Expression of Interest covering research question, methods, novelty, risks, team, milestones and budget
• Deliver a public output (paper, open dataset, methodology or tool) under an open license permitting commercial use

Requirements

• Researchers at universities, non-profit research organizations, public benefit corporations, or startups under 20 people that do not sell AI training data
• Applicants must be based in the United States or United Kingdom
• Demonstrated expertise and prior work in the proposed research area; experience with agentic evaluation, RL environments or post-training is a plus
• A budget request within one of three tiers (under $50K, $200K or $500K), submitted by November 27, 2026