Mercor, an AI recruiting startup that connects domain experts with companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, disclosed a security incident linked to a supply‑chain attack on the open‑source LiteLLM project. The breach, attributed to the hacking group TeamPCP, affected thousands of organizations and coincided with claims by the extortion group Lapsus$ that it had accessed Mercor's data. Mercor said it moved quickly to contain the incident, engaged leading third‑party forensics experts, and continues to communicate with customers and contractors while investigations proceed. Read more →

Deccan AI, a San Francisco‑based startup that supplies post‑training data and evaluation work for frontier AI models, closed a $25 million all‑equity Series A round led by A91 Partners with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures. The company leverages a large India‑based contributor network to deliver services such as expert feedback generation, model evaluation, and reinforcement‑learning environments for customers that include Google DeepMind and Snowflake. With about 125 employees and a pool of over one million contributors, Deccan aims to meet the growing demand for high‑quality, time‑critical data that drives reliable AI deployment. Read more →