AI training company says we’re paid hourly, but won’t pay unless a task passes hours of automated checks. Is this legal?

Location: Texas

I’ve been working as an independent contractor for an AI training company.

The company has projects that they create and invite AI trainers/contributors. For example, a current project is advertised as paying $10 an hour, but the terms say you only get paid if you successfully submit a task (tricking/stumping AI successfuly). Each task also has a 10-hour payment cap. So you can work 10 hours, fail to get the task through their system, and receive nothing. If it takes 30 hours, you still only get paid for 10, if you are even able to submit it at all. For example, one task of mine took 40 hours, and after giving up, I decided to attempt to submit the hours that I had worked but was immediately blocked. I never got paid for the work I did attempting to trick the AI model. This has happened with multiple tasks, and plenty of other people openly discuss their frustration with this work structure in the internal messaging channels.

The tasks are extremely difficult. We have to create expert-level coding problems, and then pass a long series of automated checks that the company states/creates themselves. These checks use AI which can hallucinate, overly scrutinize, and often increase in difficulty - I assume they do this to make it harder to be able to submit tasks, give up, and basically do free work validating their AI datasets. What makes it more difficult is that the company continues to add more automated checks so that they can ensure we pass a quality threshold, so it definitely seems that they are makign the work increasingly difficult over time.

Another issue is that their own system keeps breaking. Trainers have to wait hours for the platform to fix their system issues, which further makes it harder to complete tasks.

I’m not claiming that I can prove fraud or that they are intentionally collecting free work. What I’m trying to understand is if this could be worker misclassification, especially given how much control the company has over the pay, workflow, acceptance process, and whether we can submit anything? The terms are very explicit on the hourly pay model, but the company still seems to face serious legal scrutiny anyways. It has active lawsuits against it with a very recent one a just few days ago for this exact reason. Either way, what is the legality of this? I have dozens of hours unaccounted and unpaid for, and many people can say the same.