The legal classification under the FLSA and ABC tests of distributed human micro-task workers annotating prompt pairs and red-teaming foundation models.
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and rigorous state ABC independent contractor tests (Dynamex), workers who perform core operational functions under detailed platform instructions are presumed to be employees entitled to minimum wage, overtime, and rest breaks. Platforms employing gig-economy workers for prompt engineering, RLHF scoring, and red-teaming face substantial misclassification liability.
