A college student thought he'd struck gold training AI. Then he says he got burned.

Joel Thomas was hooked the instant he saw the pay rate.

Handshake AI, the startup rearward a career-services app that his university recommended, welcomed him to use in August for AI training work paying $50 an hr or more. That would be enough, he figured, to shield his university expenses for a entire year.

Now, Thomas says, he is due concerning $11,000 in rear pay for hundreds of hours of activity he did on Handshake's platform. Handshake has denied his appeals. The business told him there was no document of his activity on one project during the third week of August, although a Handshake pay declaration showed he had completed hundreds of tasks that week.

He isn't alone. Nearly two dozen current and erstwhile contractors told Business Insider that Handshake this twelvemonth underpaid them by hundreds or thousands of dollars each. Disputes from those contractors complete the former six months totaled $64,000, the contractors said.

Handshake stated that additional than 188,000 contractors have earned complete $500 myriad for AI training projects on its platform. Startups akin Handshake have recruited armies of students and young professionals about the earth to train AI models for tech giants specified as Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The booming AI-training industry has arrive under expanding scrutiny this year for the way it treats that sprawling contractor workforce.

Pay disputes at Handshake arose for multiple reasons, a Business Insider inquiry found. In many cases, contractors' pay didn't equivalent the dollar amounts they expected since of differences in the way Handshake and its clients tracked period and pay.

Former staffers stated insufficient full-time personnel and force to provision training data at a breakneck speed additionally contributed to the fee problems. Project managers didn't have period to location contractors' questions — specified as whenever several contractors established that instructions for a project were confusing or contradictory, erstwhile workforce and contractors said. Once a contractor completed a task, it was topic to review; if a contractor didn't comprehend the instructions and the project didn't continue the review, the contractor wouldn't be paid for the work, erstwhile workforce said.

On several marquee projects, one individual could be liable for managing up to 1,000 contractors, erstwhile staffers acquainted alongside the operations said. Business Insider reviewed bank statements, pay stubs, and hundreds of email and Slack messages between contractors and the company.

Thomas, a soft-spoken younger who in his downtime likes to hike near his northern Virginia home, stated he has tried to remain positive.

"It's difficult to do since it's motionless a lot of money," he said.

'Competitive pay, apparent expectations'

Business Insider first reported in March that dozens of contractors were complaining that Handshake had denied them payments, and that one contractor had won a $6,475 judgement in small-claims court. Handshake, in many cases, told contractors in automated messages that their accounts had been closed since they had violated phase rules. In October, following Business Insider sent Handshake detailed questions for this story, the business introduced changes to its phase that it stated would enhance pay transparency for contractors, whom Handshake calls "fellows."

Handshake stated it has made contractor pay clearer alongside a new payments dashboard, additional explanations for adjustments, and an easier disagreement process. Handshake stated it is additionally rolling out a new live timer to track activity on third-party platforms. The business told Business Insider that any contractor who believes a fee decision was wrong, or who has new information, can lift it again alongside the company's assistance team.

"Our Fellows are the bosom of Handshake AI," the business wrote in an October blog post. "As part of being a Fellow you should continually cognize what you earned, how it was calculated and whenever it volition arrive. That's a essential anticipation for anyone doing activity alongside Handshake AI, and we're committed to gathering it for all Fellow."

Handshake declined to comment on Thomas' situation, saying it doesn't comment on idiosyncratic cases.

"We obtain all disagreement seriously," the business spokesman said.

On podcasts and in LinkedIn posts, Handshake CEO Garrett Lord has often thrown transparent, dependable pay as among the company's advantages complete its rivals, which contain Scale AI and Mercor. He has stated complaints concerning delayed payments at another AI-training companies contributed to Handshake's decision to act the business.

"Most AI gigs = shifting rates, zero transparency," Lord wrote in a LinkedIn post final year. "Handshake AI = rivalrous pay, apparent expectations, and genuine dialogue. That's what experts deserve."

The AI pivot

Thomas was a sophomore at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, whenever the academy directed him to Handshake's platform, which hosts a virtual occupation fair for the school. He signed up for an document on Handshake in January.

On its website, Liberty University says it doesn't endorse content, jobs, or employers on Handshake.

"Liberty University cannot justify that use of any of these products solitary volition justify the person a affirmative outcome," it says. The academy didn't react to requests for comment.

Not lengthy following he signed up, Thomas began receiving invitations from Handshake to activity on AI training projects, which the business pivoted into final year.

Handshake, founded in 2014 by three Michigan Tech students, had started out as a occupation platform. Students who connected their Handshake accounts to their academy could hunt and use for internships and entry-level jobs, enroll for occupation fairs, and nexus alongside employers and alumni, among another services.

Colleges and universities paid Handshake a fee to nexus their students alongside prospective employers. As the AI surge became a magnet for capitalist cash, Handshake saw a bigger opportunity.

In January 2025, Handshake expanded into AI training, tapping its network of students and young alumni to assistance frontier labs train and measure their AI models. Handshake additionally rebranded, adding AI to its name.

A slew of startups akin Handshake pay gig workers to assistance create ample tongue AI models akin ChatGPT smarter. These contractors do tasks akin penning expert answers to example prompts, designing edge-case questions to test models and disclose weaknesses, and rating AI-generated responses.

Handshake's AI endeavor has exploded: Lord stated in August that its AI component had grown to additional than $1 milliard in income annualized revenue. The bulk of Handshake's revenue, erstwhile staffers told Business Insider, now comes from AI-training contracts alongside five clients: Meta, Google, OpenAI, Nvidia, and Anthropic.

Racking up the hours

"Great news!" the email said. "We have a new project through Handshake AI that we think you'd be curious in."

Thomas had taken on a brace of small Handshake AI training projects in the spring, but stopped since the hourly rates were low — about $17 per hr or less. This invitation and another that arrived in August were additional enticing. These two projects would pay $50 per hr and $65 per task, respectively.

He got correct to work, preparedness to log as many hours as imaginable before his younger twelvemonth started.

Thomas recalls that he would awaken about 8 a.m. or 9 a.m., have a coffee, and commencement operating at his laptop, sitting at the pale array in his bedroom. Wearing AirPods, he cycled through R&B from Chris Brown and Bryson Tiller. Back at his array following gym and dinner, he worked until midnight or 1 a.m.

Inside Handshake, staffers were pulling likewise lengthy hours, erstwhile workforce said. The business was scrambling to provision an ever-growing amount of training data to its clients.

Project managers used AI coding tools akin Claude or Lovable to create instructions and prompts for contractors, but they were sometimes contradictory, foremost contractors to search clarification on their tasks, erstwhile workforce said.

Questions from contractors piled up on Slack, and project managers didn't have period to answer them all, the erstwhile workforce said.

One of Thomas' projects was called Project Folio, a study of ChatGPT use patterns for which he was asked to upload his former conversation logs alongside ChatGPT. For another project, he had to measure ChatGPT responses.

As he racked up hours, Thomas could see his earnings ticking up on his Handshake dashboard. At one point, the figure topped $19,000, he says.

There was item crucial concerning that dashboard that Thomas says he didn't know.

Like most AI-training platforms, Handshake pays contractors in units that audio intuitive — dollars per hour, or dollars per task.

The dollar figures that Thomas and another Handshake contractors saw on their dashboards were estimates according to the period they had manually logged by starting and stopping a timer. The AI business paying for the project had another timer logging their activity — a timer that the contractors couldn't see, erstwhile Handshake workforce told Business Insider.

Before paying contractors, Handshake compared the contractor's self-reported hours alongside the client's timer.

Handshake didn't inform contractors what counted as billable time, or how it was calculated by the client, erstwhile contractors and workforce said.

"Final pay reflects the activity our systems verify," the Handshake spokesman told Business Insider. "Where logged period doesn't equivalent the work, we assessment it, and anywhere we discover inflated period we don't pay for it."

Handshake stated the business is committed to paying contractors accurately for the period they activity and making certain it's apparent how much they volition be paid.

When a contractor disagrees alongside a fee decision, "a dedicated squad autonomous of the project reviews it in complete and can reconstruct all or part of the amount," the Handshake spokesman said.

'This is ridiculous'

Thomas transferred to the University of Mary Washington in the fall. He was in the archive during his archetypal week of classes there whenever he saw a fee arrive through from Handshake. It was far lesser than he expected.

Angry and confused, he went to Reddit, anywhere AI trainers frequently conversation concerning their activity for Handshake and its competitors. He posted a screenshot of the fee and wrote: "This is specified a scum item to do and I am unsure what I should do. Just desire to disclose them as much as imaginable since this is ridiculous."

Another person suggested person at the business whom Thomas could contact. Thomas says the reply he received from Handshake wasn't reassuring.

By the period his next fee arrived, Thomas was braced for another disappointment. It, too, came up short, Thomas said. In all, he was paid $8,000 for what he believed was $19,000 value of work.

He hadn't captured a screenshot whenever his dashboard showed $19,000, but he had captured one whenever it showed $15,741.23 "awaiting payout" on his account. He emailed the screenshot to Handshake assistance staff.

"I extremely propose you inspect your systems," Thomas wrote in an August 27 email.

Handshake told him that the "awaiting payout" fig was an evaluation according to the times he had clocked in and out on the Handshake timer, and that before final payment, the business had checked his period against his completed tasks. For the duration of August 17 to August 23, the business told him, "our project leads did not discover any tasking that took location during this period frame."

This clarification seemed to battle alongside a pay declaration Thomas received for that period, showing that he completed 428 tasks for Project Novel and would obtain no pay for them.

A Handshake spokesman told Business Insider that contractors aren't paid for tasks if the tasks aren't approved by reviewers, and that the expression "no tasking took place" is shorthand for "no verified work." The business may refuse fee for period that exceeds a project cap, or for logged period that doesn't equivalent the recorded work, the spokesman added.

Handshake notified Thomas that it had deactivated his document since of irregular action "that does not align alongside our phase policies and use expectations."

Thomas remains carefully optimistic concerning how AI power form his career. He stated he sees AI as a helpful tool for assisting work, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and math. At the identical time, he worries that AI volition substitute too many jobs and could create it harder for several group to discover work.

He's motionless open to assisting train AI models. But he's stated up on getting any additional pay from Handshake.

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