How OpenAI and Anthropic compete to headhunt top AI talent that already has it all

The equivalent of big-name transfers in soccer has taken place in the AI world in recent weeks – but how do you convince staff who have it all to shift?

Even if you couldn’t say that OpenAI and Anthropic are bitter enemies, they’re far from best friends. As well as competing in the AI race, the two companies have been less than complimentary to one another as they attempt to claim supremacy over each other.

This drove the decision by Andrej Karpathy, who was one of the original co-founders of OpenAI, to jump ship to Anthropic to help build a team that will bolster the firm’s pretraining capabilities.

"I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative," Karpathy wrote in a post on X, adding he was “very excited” to get back to research and development.

Karpathy is a rare high-profile individual in the AI space who hasn’t felt wedded to one single company over another. He’s also previously taken a role at Tesla, overseeing its AI projects. So while he’s a co-founder of OpenAI, he’s also shown that he’s not as tribal as some of those within the AI community can be.

But his decision to move to Anthropic was an eye-catching one, because it shows the ability for frontier AI labs to still attract big names from the sector, even if they’ve previously been integral to the success of a competitor.

What’s going on?

It begs the question of how you get someone like Karpathy to jump ship. It’s certainly not money.

“Frontier AI labs are all offering packages in the millions now. At that level, money stops being the deciding factor,” said Fahed Bizzari, an organisational AI strategist and managing partner of Bellamy Alden, a management consultancy.

It’s also not the obvious things that many tech companies tend to reach for when they’re trying to promote a positive working environment. Free food and drinks and in-office yoga lessons, or travel to and from work on buses, as many Silicon Valley firms offer, are nice perks, but they’re not dealbreakers for the top talent. Health insurance coverage is a nice-to-have, but not necessarily the thing that will make a luminary choose your firm over a competitor’s.

Instead, said Bizzari, what attracts the top talent is a true challenge – and a sense of purpose that allows them to exercise their talent, and is perceived as more valuable than compensation.

“Karpathy joined Anthropic's pre-training team to work on a specific problem with a specific group of researchers,” said Bizzari. “What moves elite AI talent is the quality of the problem, the calibre of the team and the compute available to go after it. Compensation gets you into the room, but it doesn't close the deal.”

Picking and choosing

Having oversight and ownership of your own work can be a big lure, too, said Ceci Brown, director of growth and partnerships at Pickle, a business support consultancy. The more senior you are, the more the wider working environment factors into your final decision.

“They want to know whether they will have the autonomy to do meaningful work, access to the right decision-makers, and the support around them to make an impact quickly,” she said. Being able to make a convincing case for someone to join your company and be given autonomy to do what will benefit the company – and be fun for you – is a major sell.

There’s also an element of showing how those individuals can fit into the bigger picture, and making the organization’s direction clear. “The companies that win senior talent are usually the ones that show they are serious about creating space for high-value work, not just adding impressive names to the team,” said Bizzari.

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