Forbes: Surge AI, Mercor, AfterQuery and Turing Sold ~$500M/Year of Training Data to Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance
Summary
The same US vendors staffing OpenAI's and Anthropic's training pipelines are simultaneously selling data services to Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance — AfterQuery pulling $50M+ recurring from Chinese labs, Mercor at ~2% of a $2B run-rate, Surge AI CEO traveling to Beijing to meet lab executives directly. Forbes cites internal documentation and audio, not just anonymous tips; this is an active commercial practice at scale, not a hypothetical policy gap.
Originally reported by forbes.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Forbes: Surge AI, Mercor, AfterQuery and Turing Sold ~$500M/Year of Training Data to Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance