Scale AI is suing a former employee and rival Mercor, alleging they tried to steal its biggest customers  

Scale AI, which helps technology companies to prepare data to train their AI models, brought a lawsuit against one of the former sales staff and its rival Mercor on Wednesday. The lawsuit claims that the employee, which was hired by Mercor, has stolen more than 100 confidential documents with regard to the customer strategies of Scale and other own information, “said a copy seen by WAN.

Scale complains Mercor for embezzlement of commercial secrets and the former employee, Eugene Ling, suits for breach of contract. The suit also claims that the employee tried to pitch Mercor for one of the largest customers of scale before he officially left his former job. The Pak calls this company “customer A.”

Mercor co-founder Surya Midha denies that his company used data from scale, although he admits that Ling might have been in the possession of some.

“Although Mercor has hired many people who have left the scale, we are not interested in the trade secrets of a scale and we are in fact deliberately in a different way to lead our company. Eugene has informed us that he had old documents in a personal Google Drive, which we have never accessible and now investigating,” Midha WAN said.

“We searched to scales six days ago to let Eugene destroy the files or reach another resolution, and we are now waiting for their response,” Midha said.

Scale claims that these documents contain the specific data with which Mercor can serve the customer A, as well as various other of the most important customers of the scale.

Scale wanted Mercor to give it a complete list of the files in the disk and would prevent Ling from working with customer A. It claims in the suit that Mercor refused. Ling did not immediately respond to WAN’s request to comment, but he later wrote on x: “Just heard that I am being charged by scale. Last month I left a scale to work at Mercor. I know this was frustrating for my old team, and I feel bad about that.”

Continued Ling: “When the scale reached some files that I had in my personal drive, I asked if I could just remove them. But the scale asked that I would not do anything with them, so I still wait for guidance about how I can solve this. I have never used one of this role in it.

There are scarce instructions in the suit about the identity of customer A. The suit says that if the rival of the scale resides this customer, it would be a contract “worth millions of dollars for Mercor.”

Whatever the details of this suit, it shows one thing: scale is clear enough about the threat of Mercor to take legal steps. As TechCrunch reported earlier, even with the investment of meta’s multibillion-dollar in scale, TBD-Labs de Kerne unit within Meta that is responsible for building AI-SUPERTELGENCE-NOG always uses Mercor and other LLM data training courses.

Mercor rises in the LLM Training Arena because it is known for hiring content specialists, often doctoral, to train LLM data in their areas of expertise.

In June the scale announced that Meta invested $ 14.3 billion for a scale of 49% in scale and hired his founder. Shortly thereafter, Several of the largest data customers of the AI ​​scale, who are competitors of Meta’s efforts, reportedly break the ties.

Updated with comments on social media from Eugene Ling.