The AI Training Job Market in October 2026

Platforms listed about 0 new roles a week over the last week, against 0 a week in the week before.Finding 1

No open roles were recorded on 31 Oct 2026.Summary

Too few platforms were tracked throughout 1 Oct 2026 to 31 Oct 2026 to read a like-for-like change.Summary

On 31 Oct 2026, AI training listings were unconcentrated overall (HHI 0 across 0 platforms).Summary

Not enough daily snapshots to show trends 1 Oct 2026 to 31 Oct 2026.Summary

The daily record covers 0 of the 31 days 1 Oct 2026 to 31 Oct 2026 (0%).Finding 1

Not enough priced roles on 31 Oct 2026 to compare pay within kinds of work.Summary

On 31 Oct 2026, too few platforms stated rates for the same work to compare them.Summary

No open roles were recorded on 31 Oct 2026.Summary

No open roles were recorded on 31 Oct 2026.Summary

No open roles were recorded on 31 Oct 2026.Summary

No apply clicks were recorded from 1 Oct 2026 to 31 Oct 2026.Summary

Too few apply clicks from 1 Oct 2026 to 31 Oct 2026 to compare roles within kinds of work.Summary

No open role named a language in this window.Summary

No open role named an expert field in this window.Summary

Too few fields, languages or kinds of work had enough data on 31 Oct 2026 to rank how hard they are to staff.Summary

No Coding & Software Evaluation roles naming a programming language were open on 31 Oct 2026.Summary

No roles with a known listing date were listed from 3 Aug 2026 to 31 Oct 2026.Summary

Too few dated postings from 1 Oct 2026 to 31 Oct 2026 to read when AI training roles are posted.Summary

No full role descriptions were available on 31 Oct 2026.Summary

No open roles were read on 31 Oct 2026.Summary

No full descriptions were read on 31 Oct 2026; no application forms were read.Summary

No open roles were recorded on 31 Oct 2026.Summary

Only n/a of open roles carry a senior, staff or principal title.Finding 1

From the week of 5 Oct 2026 to the week of 19 Oct 2026, too few fields, languages or kinds of work had enough open roles on the 0 platforms tracked throughout to compare their growth.Summary

On the 0 platforms tracked throughout, from the week of 5 Oct 2026 to the week of 19 Oct 2026, 0 groups began to get new listings in the last 1 weeks after none in the first 2, and 0 got none in the last 1 after some before; no group appeared in or vanished from the open roles.Finding 1

128 published figures on what AI labs pay for human data, from 2021 to 30 Oct 2026: lab spend, vendor bill rates against worker pay, vendors' take, RL-environment prices, prices per task and contract sizes; the largest spend figure recorded: Surge reportedly generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2024 from work with AI labs (Surge AI, reported).Summary

US data vendors (Surge AI, Mercor, AfterQuery, Turing) and Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance and other Chinese labs: About $500M a year of training data sold to Chinese labs (paid by the buyer; training data services, reported, 8 Aug 2026).Finding 1

Mercor: $93/hr average contracted rate; $4M+ daily payouts; oncologist roles $350 to $450 an hour (paid to the worker; expert human data (all domains), stated, 30 Oct 2026).Finding 2

To 30 Oct 2026, the evidence shows labs buying more coding (production-like environments), computer-use app and website clones and egocentric and robotics demonstration data and less generalist annotation and microtasks and static maths and verifiable coding tasks.Summary

Rising: coding (production-like environments), computer-use app and website clones, egocentric and robotics demonstration data, enterprise workflow RL environments and data, expert judgment (creative and non-professional domains), expert judgment (professional domains), in-house human data and environment teams at labs, licensed media and content, off-the-shelf and synthetic data, RL environments (all domains), voice and conversational audio and wet-lab and experimental science data.Finding 1

Enterprise workflow RL environments and data has the most evidence (8 items).Finding 3

From 11 Jul 2023 to 31 Oct 2026, 93 content and data licensing deals between AI companies and data owners are recorded, 22 with a published price; the largest is News Corp with OpenAI ("Could be" close to $250 million over five years, per The Wall Street Journal (as reported by VentureBeat); terms not disclosed by the parties).Summary

OpenAI signed the most deals (25), ahead of Meta (14) and Google (9).Finding 3

The most frequent kind of licensor is news publisher (44 deals), then music (15) and stock media (8).Finding 4