Anthropic is emerging as a leader in the AI talent wars, siphoning top talent from some of its biggest rivals.
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 8 times more likely to leave the company for Anthropic, while at DeepMind, that ratio was almost 11:1 in Anthropic’s favor.
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 former 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.
The demand for leading researchers has massively outpaced the supply as AI labs vie to build more advanced models and outpace each other in a high-stakes AI arms race.
OpenAI’s former CTO, Mira Murati’s departure from the company 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.
