Key findings
- 1
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).
- 2
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).
- 3
Appen: Gross margin 43.3% in Q3 FY26 (39.2% a year earlier); 39.2% for January to September 2026 (kept by the vendor; human data for AI (all services), stated, 29 Oct 2026).
- 4
RL environment vendors (interviews) and frontier labs: Contract sizes often six to seven figures per quarter; one founder said often seven figures per quarter or more (paid by the buyer; RL environment, reported, 12 Jan 2026).
- 5
Spirit Airlines (bankruptcy estate, seller) and micro1 (bidder): micro1 proposed $12.5M, beating Google's $10M top bid; Mercor had bid $7.5M (paid by the buyer; enterprise records (emails, documents, Teams data), stated, Sep 2026).
- 6
Human Archive: Raw data $1 to $10 per hour (Rs 95 to 946), priced by task complexity (paid by the buyer; egocentric video (raw), reported, 1 Jul 2026).
Figure 1
What labs spend on human data
How much do AI labs spend on human data, and how much of a vendor's revenue do they make up?
| Company | Figure as published | Whose money |
|---|---|---|
| US data vendors (Surge AI, Mercor, AfterQuery, Turing) (Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance and other Chinese labs)AI Weekly (summarising Forbes) | About $500M a year of training data sold to Chinese labs | Paid by the buyer |
| AfterQuery (Chinese labs)AI Weekly (summarising Forbes) | $50M+ recurring revenue from Chinese labs; Mercor about 2% of a $2B run rate | Paid by the buyer |
| Leading AI labs (forecast)Ground Level AI | More than $100 billion a year by the end of the decade | Paid by the buyer |
| Mercor (AI foundation model companies (OpenAI, Anthropic and others))BigGo Finance (summarising The Information) | About 91% of H1 2026 revenue ($614M) came from foundation model companies | Paid by the buyer |
| micro1 and similar data firms (robotics companies)MIT Technology Review | Robotics companies spend more than $100 million a year buying real-world data from micro1 and similar firms | Paid by the buyer |
| Innodata (one unnamed customer (Innodata says its customers include five of the "Magnificent Seven" and several AI labs))Innodata Inc., Form 10-K (SEC EDGAR) | One DDS customer about 58% of Innodata's FY2025 revenue (48% in FY2024) | Paid by the buyer |
| Anthropic (RL environment vendors)TechCrunch | Leaders discussed spending more than $1 billion on RL environments over the next year | Paid by the buyer |
| Scale AI (Google)TechCrunch (citing Reuters) | Google had planned to pay Scale AI $200 million in 2025 before moving to cut ties | Paid by the buyer |
| Scale AI (Google)Storyboard18 (citing Reuters) | Google spent around $150 million on Scale AI services in 2024 | Paid by the buyer |
| Surge AI (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta)TechCrunch | Surge reportedly generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2024 from work with AI labs | Paid by the buyer |
| Appen (Google)Appen Limited (ASX: APX), ASX announcement | FY23 revenue from Google $82.8 million, 30.3% of Appen's revenue; Google ended the contract effective 19 March 2024 | Paid by the buyer |
Sample. 11 figures, to 30 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
Figure 2
Bill rates, worker pay and the vendor's share
What do labs pay a vendor per hour or task, what does the worker receive, and what do vendors keep?
| Company | Figure as published | Whose money |
|---|---|---|
| MercorMercor | $93/hr average contracted rate; $4M+ daily payouts; oncologist roles $350 to $450 an hour | Paid to the worker |
| AppenAppen Limited (ASX: APX), ASX announcement | Gross margin 43.3% in Q3 FY26 (39.2% a year earlier); 39.2% for January to September 2026 | Kept by the vendor |
| Handshake AIHandshake | Fellowship opportunities list ceilings from up to $17 an hour (AI evaluation) to up to $125 (game developer, PCB tool specialist); FP&A analyst and energy professional up to $80; software engineer and philosophy expert up to $120 | Paid to the worker |
| Handshake AIReach Capital job board (Handshake posting) | $110 to $140 an hour for physicians, 15+ hours a week, with milestone bonuses | Paid to the worker |
| DataAnnotationDataAnnotation | Expert rates of up to $75 to $125+ an hour; software engineer and data scientist up to $150+; generalist up to $50 | Paid to the worker |
| Alignerr (Labelbox)Alignerr (powered by Labelbox) | $80 an hour average pay; $1M paid weekly; search-quality roles listed at $40 to $120 an hour | Paid to the worker |
| TeracTerac | $100 to $300 an hour for physician experts reviewing medical ai | Paid to the worker |
| TeracTerac | $60 to $150 an hour for nurse experts reviewing healthcare ai | Paid to the worker |
| TeracTerac | $60 to $160 an hour for finance experts evaluating ai | Paid to the worker |
| TeracTerac | $60 to $200 an hour for software engineers reviewing ai code | Paid to the worker |
| MercorMercor | $101/hr average contracted rate; $4M+ daily payouts; oncologist roles $350 to $450 an hour | Paid to the worker |
| MercorMercor | Oncologist roles $350 to $450 an hour | Paid to the worker |
| MercorMercor (job listing) | Lawyers $100 to $150 an hour, set per project by scope and depth | Paid to the worker |
| MercorMercor (job listing) | Health professions $60 to $180 an hour, set per project by scope and depth | Paid to the worker |
| MercorMercor (job listing) | Data analysis experts $70 to $120 an hour | Paid to the worker |
| Surge AISacra | Approved annotators earn 30 to 40 cents per working minute | Paid to the worker |
| Invisible TechnologiesSacra | Pays workers in emerging markets approximately $5 to $10 an hour | Paid to the worker |
| Fedpoint Systems LLC (US federal agencies (GSA MAS))GSA CALC+ (Contract-Awarded Labor Category), MAS ceiling rates | $152.72 an hour ceiling for a Medical Annotator III (Bachelors, 4 years), Fedpoint Systems | Paid by the buyer |
| Fedpoint Systems LLC (US federal agencies (GSA MAS))GSA CALC+ (Contract-Awarded Labor Category), MAS ceiling rates | $124.84 an hour ceiling for a Clinical Annotator III (Bachelors, 4 years), Fedpoint Systems | Paid by the buyer |
| Chenega Systems, LLC (US federal agencies (GSA MAS))GSA CALC+ (Contract-Awarded Labor Category), MAS ceiling rates | $94.33 an hour ceiling for an intermediate Data Labeler (Bachelors, 5 years, security clearance), Chenega Systems | Paid by the buyer |
| Chenega Technology & Modernized Solutions, LLC (US federal agencies (GSA MAS))GSA CALC+ (Contract-Awarded Labor Category), MAS ceiling rates | $72.98 an hour ceiling for a Data Labeler III with TS/SCI clearance (Bachelors, 5 years), Chenega Technology & Modernized Solutions | Paid by the buyer |
| Pharmavise Consulting Corporation (US federal agencies (GSA MAS))GSA CALC+ (Contract-Awarded Labor Category), MAS ceiling rates | $113.70 an hour ceiling for a Labeling Project Specialist (Bachelors, 5 years), Pharmavise Consulting | Paid by the buyer |
| Exovera LLC (US federal agencies (GSA MAS))GSA CALC+ (Contract-Awarded Labor Category), MAS ceiling rates | $99.83, $148.24 and $193.82 an hour ceilings for Data Curation and Integrity levels I, II and III (Bachelors; 1, 3 and 7 years), Exovera | Paid by the buyer |
| 8 Consulting LLC (US federal agencies (GSA MAS))GSA CALC+ (Contract-Awarded Labor Category), MAS ceiling rates | $98.54 an hour ceiling for a Qualified Prompt Engineer (High school, 1 year), 8 Consulting; its mid-career prompt engineer is $120.28 | Paid by the buyer |
| Cyntelligent Solutions, LLC (US federal agencies (GSA MAS))GSA CALC+ (Contract-Awarded Labor Category), MAS ceiling rates | $140.93 an hour ceiling for a Prompt Engineering Specialist (Bachelors, 3 years), Cyntelligent Solutions | Paid by the buyer |
| Recruiters advertising AI-training work (Bloomberg)PYMNTS (citing Bloomberg) | Recruiters advertise $400 an hour for attorneys | Paid to the worker |
| Recruiters advertising AI-training work (Bloomberg)PYMNTS (citing Bloomberg) | Recruiters advertise $170 an hour for condensed matter physics experts | Paid to the worker |
| Recruiters advertising AI-training work (Bloomberg)PYMNTS (citing Bloomberg) | Recruiters advertise up to $120 an hour for software engineers | Paid to the worker |
| MercorPYMNTS (citing Bloomberg) | Mercor says its workers average $110 an hour; it did not have data on what share of tasks pay that rate | Paid to the worker |
| Handshake AIPYMNTS (citing Bloomberg) | Handshake's physician posting lists up to $200 an hour depending on the project | Paid to the worker |
| Handshake AIPYMNTS (citing Bloomberg) | Handshake's lawyer posting pays $90 to $110 an hour | Paid to the worker |
| TeracTerac (job board) | $112 an hour for legal professionals on an ongoing weekly commitment with software time tracking | Paid to the worker |
| MercorMercor | $109/hr average contracted rate; $4M+ daily payouts | Paid to the worker |
| Outlier (Scale AI)Outlier (Scale AI) | Up to $1,350 per task; tasks typically take 6 to 7 hours | Paid to the worker |
| MercorSacra | Percentage-based recruiting fee, typically 30%, for direct talent placements | Kept by the vendor |
| HandshakeSacra | AI data business gross margins around 30%, versus about 80% for the job board | Kept by the vendor |
| Scale AISacra | Monetizes per task, marking up the cost of labor, for 50%+ gross margin | Kept by the vendor |
| TeracTerac (job board) | $200 an hour for hospitalists and family medicine physicians, minimum five hours of case review | Paid to the worker |
| Mindrift (Toloka)Mindrift | $30 to $90 an hour on specialized projects; all-access projects typically under $20; maximums by domain: coding and STEM $90, agentic evaluation $80, legal $75, consulting $70, design $50, writing $30 | Paid to the worker |
| Mindrift (Toloka)Mindrift | Legal projects: up to $75 an hour for a licensed practitioner | Paid to the worker |
| Handshake AIHandshake (job board) | $32 to $95 an hour (W-2, hourly, employed through TCWGlobal) | Paid to the worker |
| Mercor, Handshake, micro1TechCrunch | Roughly 60% to 70% of top-line income paid out to domain specialists | Kept by the vendor |
| MercorHeroHunt.ai | Third-party analysts estimate Mercor's take at roughly 30% to 35% of billed hours, with contractors receiving 60% to 70% of gross billings | Kept by the vendor |
| MercorHeroHunt.ai | At a 30% to 35% margin, a $109 an hour expert costs the buyer roughly $150 to $165 an hour; a $200 specialist hour lands near $275 to $300 | Buyer's price and worker's pay |
| Unnamed lab and vendor (36Kr example, relayed by HeroHunt)HeroHunt.ai | A lab paying about $150 an hour for a physician's time sees roughly $95 of it reach the physician | Buyer's price and worker's pay |
| Handshake AIHandshake (job board) | $65 to $158 an hour (contract, remote, USA) | Paid to the worker |
| Handshake AIHandshake (job board) | $65 to $125 an hour (contract, remote, USA) | Paid to the worker |
| Handshake AIHandshake (job board) | Pays about $60 million a month to more than 30,000 individuals, on a run rate of about $1 billion | Paid to the worker |
| Surge AIContrary Research | Charges 50% to ten times more than competitors; per-project fee model, no public price list | Paid by the buyer |
| micro1TechCrunch | Net annual run rate $150M to $200M on a $500M gross run rate (about 30% to 40% retained) | Kept by the vendor |
| micro1TechCrunch | Gross margins on off-the-shelf data as high as 80% to 90% | Kept by the vendor |
| DexSetDexSet | Teleoperation data $28 to $60 per raw hour, of which operator labor is $18 to $38 per hour | Buyer's price and worker's pay |
| Indian egocentric data suppliers (unnamed) (global robotics labs (unnamed))StartupFeed | Packaged egocentric data resold abroad at $15 to $50 per hour; workers earn about Rs 400 per day (not converted) | Buyer's price and worker's pay |
| ProlificProlific (job board) | Researchers tend to pay domain experts up to $150 an hour per AI task completed | Paid to the worker |
| Terac (a Fortune 500 company (unnamed))Terac | Over $170,000 in contractor payouts for roughly 1,000 hours of expert work by about 300 finance and accounting professionals in 72 hours | Paid to the worker |
| MercorBigGo Finance (summarising The Information) | Gross margin 33% in Q2 2026; company expects 46% next year and 56% by 2030 | Kept by the vendor |
| MercorDealroom News (summarising The Information) | Pays 60% to 70% of topline revenue to contractors; net revenue roughly $600M to $800M on a $2B gross run rate | Kept by the vendor |
| Human ArchiveTechCrunch | $1 per hour base rate to workers; other companies reportedly pay Rs 250 to Rs 400 per hour | Paid to the worker |
| HandshakeDealroom News (summarising The Information) | Net AI-training revenue approaches $300M on gross AI-training revenue of nearly $1B | Kept by the vendor |
| micro1Henry's Best Hits (Henry Shi), interview with micro1 founder Ali Ansari | Average across all pipelines $60 to $70 an hour | Paid to the worker |
| micro1Henry's Best Hits (Henry Shi), interview with micro1 founder Ali Ansari | Expert-level pipelines in finance, medical and legal run at $170 to $180 an hour | Paid to the worker |
| micro1Henry's Best Hits (Henry Shi), interview with micro1 founder Ali Ansari | Margins are 30% to 40% | Kept by the vendor |
| AppenAppen Limited (ASX: APX), ASX announcement | Crowd expenses 59.7% of revenue; gross margin 40.3% (FY24: 60.7% and 39.3%) | Kept by the vendor |
| InnodataInnodata Inc., Form 10-K (SEC EDGAR) | DDS segment gross margin 39% in FY2025 (37% in FY2024); direct operating costs about 61% of segment revenue (63% in FY2024); whole company 40% (39%) | Kept by the vendor |
| Unnamed third-party suppliers (OpenAI Project Mercury) (OpenAI)Fortune (Bloomberg) | $150 per hour to write prompts and build financial models | Paid to the worker |
| Invisible TechnologiesSacra | Charges clients by task complexity, from $10 to $40 an hour historically for basic admin work to higher prices for specialized AI training | Paid by the buyer |
| MercorBigGo Finance (summarising The Information) | Gross margin 27% in 2025 | Kept by the vendor |
| Invisible TechnologiesSacra | About $15M EBITDA on $134M 2024 revenue, about 11% EBITDA margin | Kept by the vendor |
| Sama (OpenAI)TIME | OpenAI paid Sama $12.50 per hour; labelers took home about $1.32 to $2 per hour (Sama said $1.46 to $3.74 after tax) | Buyer's price and worker's pay |
Sample. 69 figures, to 30 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
A bill rate is what the buyer pays the vendor; worker pay is what the person doing the work receives; the difference funds recruiting, quality control, tooling and margin.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
Figure 3
What RL environments cost
What do labs pay for reinforcement-learning environments and tasks?
| Company | Figure as published | Whose money |
|---|---|---|
| RL environment vendors (interviews) (frontier labs)Epoch AI | Contract sizes often six to seven figures per quarter; one founder said often seven figures per quarter or more | Paid by the buyer |
| RL environment vendors (interviews) (neolabs)Epoch AI | Contracts in the $300k to $500k range | Paid by the buyer |
| RL environment vendors (interviews)Epoch AI | Around $300k for high-quality replicas of complex products like Slack | Paid by the buyer |
| RL environment vendors (interviews)Epoch AI | $200 to $2,000 per task; $20k per task rare but possible | Paid by the buyer |
| RL environment vendors (interviews)Epoch AI | Exclusive deals roughly 4 to 5 times more expensive than non-exclusive | Paid by the buyer |
| UI-gym builders (unnamed) (OpenAI)SemiAnalysis | About $20,000 per website; OpenAI has purchased hundreds of sites | Paid by the buyer |
| MechanizeMechanize | Inefficient to spend much less than about $500 per RL task; expected to rise about fivefold to a few thousand dollars within a year; compute about $480 per task per run, $2,400 over five reuses | Paid by the buyer |
Sample. 7 figures, to 30 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
Figure 4
Prices per task, item and hour of data
What does one unit of human data cost: a preference pair, an expert evaluation, an hour of video?
| Company | Figure as published | Whose money |
|---|---|---|
| micro1 (buyer publishing what it pays) (data-owning companies (sellers))micro1 | $100K to $500K qualified partnerships; $500K to $2M large-scale datasets; $2M+ highly unique proprietary data | Paid by the buyer |
| OpenTrain AIOpenTrain AI | Managed service: the expert's rate plus a flat 20% management fee, so a $30 an hour expert costs the client $36 an hour; no contracts, no minimums | Buyer's price and worker's pay |
| Amazon Mechanical TurkAmazon Mechanical Turk | 20% fee on the reward and bonus; a further 20% on tasks with 10 or more assignments (40% in all); 5% more to use Masters workers | Buyer's price and worker's pay |
| ProlificProlific | Platform fee usually 42.8% for corporate customers, 33.3% for academic or non-profit; minimum participant pay $8.00/hr, recommended at least $12.00/hr | Buyer's price and worker's pay |
| OpenTrain AIOpenTrain AI | 10% marketplace fee plus $9.95 when a new contract starts | Kept by the vendor |
| FileYieldFileYield | 8% from sellers and 6% from buyers | Kept by the vendor |
| micro1 (buyer publishing what it pays) (data-owning companies (sellers))micro1 | $100k+ qualified partnerships; $500k+ large-scale datasets; $1M+ highly unique proprietary data | Paid by the buyer |
| micro1 (buyer publishing what it pays) (data-owning companies (sellers))micro1 | Company compensation $100K to $2M+ for approved data packages | Paid by the buyer |
| Scale AIHeroHunt.ai | Historically about 2 cents per image and 6 cents per annotation on simple tasks, with multipliers for language, consensus and complexity | Paid by the buyer |
| Robot data market (vendor benchmark)DexSet | Egocentric human video $15 to $40 per hour; annotation passes $8 to $25 per hour extra | Paid by the buyer |
| Human ArchiveStartupFeed | Raw data $1 to $10 per hour (Rs 95 to 946), priced by task complexity | Paid by the buyer |
| SpeechData.aiSpeechData.ai | Catalog datasets at $60 to $95 per hour across 60 languages and dialects | Paid by the buyer |
| RLHF services market (vendor estimate)NextWealth | General preference tasks $0.10 to $0.50 per comparison | Paid by the buyer |
| RLHF services market (vendor estimate)NextWealth | Domain-expert annotation $1.50 to $8.00+ per task | Paid by the buyer |
| AppenVendr | Self-service pricing is typically per task, starting around $0.01 to $0.10 per simple annotation | Paid by the buyer |
| ClickworkerClickworker | The buyer sets what each participant is paid; Clickworker multiplies it by 1.4 (a 40% service fee) plus VAT | Buyer's price and worker's pay |
| Creator video licensing (Troveo, Calliope Networks and others) (OpenAI, Google and other AI companies)The Decoder (summarising Bloomberg) | $1 to $4 per minute; regular unused footage $1 to $2 per minute; premium for 4K, drone and 3D animation | Paid by the buyer |
| Amazon SageMaker Ground TruthAmazon Web Services | $0.08 per object for the first 50,000 objects a month and $0.04 for the next tier, plus the labeler's pay ($0.012 or $0.036 per label in AWS's examples) | Paid by the buyer |
| AI labs and vendors (unnamed)The Verge (with New York Magazine) | Specialized written examples "hundreds of dollars"; expert ratings $50 or more; Socratic dialogues up to $300 each; one $15 limerick | Paid by the buyer |
| Sama (OpenAI)TIME | $787.50 for a sample batch of 1,400 images (about $0.56 per image, derived) | Paid by the buyer |
Sample. 20 figures, to 30 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
Figure 5
Contract sizes
How large are the contracts between labs and data vendors?
| Company | Figure as published | Whose money |
|---|---|---|
| Spirit Airlines (bankruptcy estate, seller) (micro1 (bidder))Fortune | micro1 proposed $12.5M, beating Google's $10M top bid; Mercor had bid $7.5M | Paid by the buyer |
| Spirit Airlines (bankruptcy estate, seller) (Google (bidder))Fortune | Google's top bid of $10 million | Paid by the buyer |
| Failed startups (sellers) (Turing)Fortune | Five to ten failed-startup codebases bought, averaging tens of thousands of dollars each | Paid by the buyer |
| Wormly (seller) (unnamed data buyers)The Financial News (Korea), summarising The Information | Multiple offers of up to $300,000 for its codebase and communications, all declined | Paid by the buyer |
| Scale AI (US Department of Defense)Bloomberg | $500 million contract, a five-fold increase on a $100 million deal in September 2025 | Paid by the buyer |
| Chakra Consulting, Inc. (NIST (US Department of Commerce))USAspending.gov (US Department of the Treasury), award record | $180,035.72 obligated for multimodal AI testing and evaluation contractor support | Paid by the buyer |
| SimpleClosure (intermediary for defunct startups) (AI labs and data buyers (unnamed))Fortune | Payments typically $10,000 to $100,000 per company; nearly 100 deals recovering more than $1 million | Paid by the buyer |
| AppenVendr | Median buyer pays $37,500 a year, range $16,160 to $235,927 | Paid by the buyer |
| AppenVendr | Managed service quoted as a total project cost or a monthly retainer, often $10,000 to $100,000+ a month | Paid by the buyer |
| AppenVendr | Enterprise buyers typically commit $250,000 to $1,000,000+ a year | Paid by the buyer |
| SecureBio Inc (NIST (US Department of Commerce))USAspending.gov (US Department of the Treasury), award record | $331,800 obligated for dual-use biology benchmark design and validation | Paid by the buyer |
| Tharros Defense, Inc. (NIST (US Department of Commerce))USAspending.gov (US Department of the Treasury), award record | $813,679.52 obligated for developing evaluation tasks that assess cybersecurity capabilities of frontier models (2025-09-01 to 2026-10-15) | Paid by the buyer |
| Scale AI (Meta)TheFly via TipRanks (summarising Forbes) | At least $450M per year for five years, as part of the deal for a 49% stake | Paid by the buyer |
| ENSCO Inc (US Air Force)USAspending.gov (US Department of the Treasury), award record | $2,741,397 obligated, $9,112,367 with options, for data discovery and data labeling for persistent surveillance (to 2026-09-16, options to 2028) | Paid by the buyer |
| Michigan Engineering Services LLC (US Department of Homeland Security)USAspending.gov (US Department of the Treasury), award record | $999,836.86 obligated for SBIR Phase II data labeling and curation at scale for machine learning (2025-03-31 to 2027-03-31) | Paid by the buyer |
| Chakra Consulting, Inc. (NIST (US Department of Commerce))USAspending.gov (US Department of the Treasury), award record | $166,740 obligated for multimodal AI evaluation support services (2025-04-06 to 2026-04-11) | Paid by the buyer |
| Snorkel AI Inc (US Air Force)USAspending.gov (US Department of the Treasury), award record | $1,899,988.30 obligated for SBIR Phase II rapid data labeling for signal intelligence (2024-06-26 to 2026-05-26) | Paid by the buyer |
| Strativia LLC (NIST (US Department of Commerce))USAspending.gov (US Department of the Treasury), award record | $109,908 obligated for AI red-teaming planning and development task order services (2024-01-29 to 2024-09-30) | Paid by the buyer |
| Snorkel AI Inc (US Air Force)USAspending.gov (US Department of the Treasury), award record | $1,239,119 obligated for rapid data labeling for ISR and ground moving target indicator (2023-09-20 to 2026-03-16) | Paid by the buyer |
| Enabled Intelligence, Inc. (US Air Force)USAspending.gov (US Department of the Treasury), award record | $766,610 obligated for adapting data annotation processes and tools for hyperspectral AI development (2023-02-07 to 2024-09-02) | Paid by the buyer |
| Sama (OpenAI)TIME | Three contracts worth about $200,000 in total | Paid by the buyer |
Sample. 21 figures, to 30 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
Figure 6
Figures by kind
Which parts of the human-data economy are documented?
| Kind | Records |
|---|---|
| Worker pay vs bill rate | 42 |
| Contract size | 21 |
| Take rate or margin | 17 |
| Lab spend | 11 |
| Price list | 10 |
| Price per item | 10 |
| Vendor bill rate | 10 |
| RL environment price | 7 |
Sample. 128 figures.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
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@misc{aitrainingjobs_what_ai_labs_pay_for_human_data_2026_10,
author = {{AITraining.jobs}},
title = {What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://cyberjobs.cc/research/what-ai-labs-pay-for-human-data/2026-10}},
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