Anthropic's quiet edge in the AI talent war

Mint

5 days ago

The war for top AI talent is hitting frenzied new heights among giants like Meta and OpenAI. But it's turning out that Anthropic, maker of the popular Claude models, is the place many engineers would rather work.
New research from venture firm SignalFire shows that the startup is increasing its engineering organization faster than those competitors and more. The $170 billion AI company is hiring engineers 2.68 times faster than it's losing them. That number is 2.18 for OpenAI, 2.07 for Meta and 1.17 for Google.
To be sure, we shouldn't expect established players like Meta and Google to grow as fast as the young upstarts, SignalFire said, but Anthropic's retention advantage does stand out, especially in Silicon Valley, where recruitment efforts have hit a new peak.
Meta's drive this summer to staff its 'Superintelligence Labs" unit sparked the most recent round of talent raids with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg often making personal offers to top tier AI talent at places like at OpenAI as well as Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Apple.
Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said he won't match salaries for sky-high offers that come in from Meta, saying to do so would be unfair to the equally talented engineers who weren't targeted. Amodei made the comments on an episode of the Big Technology Podcast that aired last week. And yet, employees are still staying, he said.
So far, Zuckerberg has hired at least two employees from the startup—Joel Pobar and Anton Bakhtin—both of whom previously spent multiple years working at Meta.
But Amodei said he talked to some employees who turned down Meta's offers, saying they 'wouldn't even talk to Mark Zuckerberg."
He added, 'What they are doing is trying to buy something that cannot be bought. And that is alignment with the mission."
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees who wanted to build AI with a greater emphasis on safety and using the technology for good.
That unique mission and culture has been a huge draw for AI job seekers, according to Heather Doshay, a partner at SignalFire. While most AI companies pour huge investments into guardrails, Anthropic is uniquely outspoken about it, she said.
'I talk to a lot of candidates in the market in my job. And if I ask any candidate, what is the dream company you have at this point? Anthropic is named more often than anyone else," Doshay said.
Anthropic said it credits its commitment to safety, the quality of its research and its team of top researchers as reasons that talent chooses to go there.
In many ways, OpenAI still has an advantage when it comes to public awareness. (ChatGPT is to AI as Kleenex is to tissues, Doshay said.) But the coding capabilities of Anthropic's Claude models have long been extremely popular among the developer community—the group that makes up this talent market.
Michael Shamos, Distinguished Career Professor in the School of Computer Science and Director of the M.S. in Artificial Intelligence and Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University, said there are many factors that play into any candidate's decision on which offer to accept.
Salary is a major one, but if there's not a huge order of magnitude of difference in compensation packages, mission and culture become bigger considerations. So do the recent technology advancements of a given company.
To some degree, Shamos said, 'I think it's cyclic. If Claude is the hottest LLM right now, then people want to work for Anthropic. When GPT-5 comes out, it's going to be OpenAI again." Nor should the bigger players be discounted, he said.
A Google spokesperson said its attrition rates remain very low, and it is attracting leading AI talent, including researchers and engineers who come from top rival labs. Meta and OpenAI didn't comment.
SignalFire's Doshay said, 'Obviously there are going to be, you know, many more miles in this marathon to come. And so it's anyone's game."