- Anthropic is making gains in the AI talent war, poaching top engineers from OpenAI and DeepMind. Rival companies have been scrambling to retain elite AI researchers with sky-high pay and strict noncompetes.
Anthropic is emerging as a leader in the AI talent wars, siphoning top performers from some of its biggest rivals.
That’s according to Venture Capital firm SignalFire’s recently released 2025 State of Talent Report, which analyzed tech hiring and employment trends.
The report found that engineers from OpenAI and DeepMind were increasingly more likely to jump ship to Anthropic than the reverse.
Engineers at OpenAI were eight times more likely to leave the company for Anthropic, while at DeepMind, that ratio was almost 11:1 in Anthropic’s favor.
Anthropic also leads the AI industry in holding on to talent, with an 80% retention rate for employees hired over the last two years. DeepMind follows closely behind with 78%, while OpenAI’s retention rate trails at 67%, more aligned with larger Big Tech companies such as Meta (64%).
Some of the enthusiasm around Anthropic is to be expected; the company is a buzzy, relatively new startup. It was founded just three years ago, in 2021, by a group of ex-OpenAI employees who were reportedly concerned about their former employer rapidly scaling its technology without sufficient safeguards.
Over the past few years, Anthropic has attempted to foster a culture that gives employees more autonomy, in part to combat some Big Tech companies’ inflated salaries and brand cachet.
According to SignalFire’s report, Anthropic employees say the company embraces intellectual discourse and researcher autonomy. It also offers other talent draws, including flexible work options and clear paths for career growth.
The company’s flagship family of LLMs, Claude, has also emerged as a favorite with developers, which could influence some of the talent movement.
Anthropic’s latest AI models outperformed OpenAI’s and Google’s top models on key software engineering benchmarks. The company labeled its recently released Opus 4 model “the world’s best coding model.”
The company’s commitment to AI safety appears to have also attracted some top engineers.
Notable AI researcher Jan Leike defected to Anthropic from OpenAI last year, criticizing on the way out his former employer for focusing on “shiny products” over AI safety. Ex-Google researchers like Niki Parmar and Neil Houlsby have also jumped ship to the startup.
AI talent wars
The demand for leading researchers has massively outpaced the supply as AI labs vie to build more advanced models and outpace one another in a high-stakes AI arms race.
This has made the battle for top AI talent increasingly competitive and forced some tech companies to employ creative strategies to attract elite engineers. Google DeepMind, for example, is reportedly enforcing six- to 12-month noncompete clauses that bar some AI researchers from joining rival firms. During this time, the engineers continue to receive their normal salaries despite having no active work.
Over at OpenAI, some top AI researchers can earn more than $10 million a year. The company’s counteroffers to stop employees from joining OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever’s SSI have also reportedly reached more than $2 million in retention bonuses, in addition to equity increases of $20 million or more, per Reuters.
And CTO Mira Murati’s departure from OpenAI has caused further talent headaches.
Murati has quietly built a 60-person team to launch her rival startup, pulling in 20 staffers from OpenAI before even announcing the venture in February, according to sources who spoke to Reuters.