Well, I'd never heard anyone make it before, but sure. (I looked into Mercor a bit and know some people who've worked in data generation/labeling, which is what exposed me to that side of the operation.)

It doesn't absolve them of any theft, but it does make the assertion that they should be required to release their models to the public seem, to me, a bit farcical. There are dozens of free and open-weights models that have all trained on exactly the same web crawls and books as GPT-5 and Opus. The proprietary models are better because of proprietary data.