Mercor Research Fellowship APEX 2026
Mercor pays a $40,000 or $80,000 stipend for APEX benchmark and AI economics research. Applications close September 26, 2026.
The Mercor Research Fellowship funds people to build new APEX benchmarks, evaluation methods, and economic studies of AI. The Ashby posting sets the application deadline at September 26, 2026 at 06:00 UTC. Admission is built around a specific pitch, not a generic research rotation.
Fellows receive a 3 month stipend of $40,000 or a 6 month stipend of $80,000. The posting also lists unlimited API credits, a dedicated budget for GPU compute and paid expert time, weekly mentorship with the APEX research team, and access to Mercor's evaluation infrastructure. The program lasts 3 to 6 months. The minimum commitment is 30 hours a week. Full time is preferred. Work can be remote or in person at Mercor's San Francisco office.
The fellowship asks fellows to propose and scope a new benchmark, evaluation technique, or economic study; build and validate it with Mercor's network of domain experts; and publish a paper, an open dataset, a leaderboard, or a method the team can adopt. Focus areas include long horizon agentic tasks in professional services, real world software engineering evaluation, accounting and finance workflows, AI for science evals, and novel evaluation methodology.
Apply on the Mercor Ashby posting with the benchmark or eval technique you want to build.