In 2025, we published blog posts about two class action lawsuits by workers alleging independent contractor (IC) misclassification by two artificial intelligence (AI) companies. The first blog post involved an IC misclassification case brought against Scale AI by so-called “taskers,” workers who perform AI large language model tasks to mimic human expression by engaging in data labeling, content creation, and responding to prompts. The second blog post dealt with an IC misclassification case against Surge Labs Inc. by a data annotator engaged to perform coding assignments, distillation tasks, comparisons of AI generated responses, and data labeling to ensure that large language models become more accurate and capable of mimicking human expression. Those two AI lawsuits were filed in Northern  California courts under that state’s strict test for IC status. Among the legal developments from last month that we summarize below is an IC misclassification case against yet another AI firm, Mercor.io, on behalf of highly skilled professionals who train AI models and chatbots. Notably, this new case was not brought in California but rather in Texas, and it alleges violations of ERISA and the Internal Revenue Code, both of which have far more reasonable tests for IC status than does California. We anticipate that this new lawsuit will likely prompt even more AI workers around the U.S. to file IC misclassification cases against other AI companies. We also expect that this type of case will propel savvy businesses in the AI field to use processes such as IC Diagnostics™ to enhance their compliance with state and federal IC laws and thereby minimize their exposure to IC misclassification lawsuits and liability.