Meta needs to work harder if it wants to make Anthropic sweat the AI talent wars — at least, that’s what CEO Dario Amodei is saying.
Amodei said that Anthropic is generally faring better than the competition amid Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to poach top talent from rivals, with reported pay packages as high as $100 million.
“You can see publicly the list of people who went to the Meta Superintelligence Lab,” Amodei recently told Stripe cofounder John Collison on Collison’s “Cheeky Pint” podcast. “Even if you normalize for our size,” he said, “many turned them down.”
“I think relative to other companies, we’ve done well. We may even have been relatively advantaged,” the Anthropic CEO added.
Amodei said that his employees are largely choosing to stay due to a mixture of loyalty and the potential financial upside.
“It’s like a mixture of true belief in the mission and belief in the upside of the equity,” Amodei said. “I think Anthropic has developed a reputation for doing what it says it will do, in some cases making less promises, but keeping those promises that we make.”
Anthropic hasn’t emerged unscathed from the AI talent wars. Meta successfully hired away at least one high-profile Anthropic employee, Joel Pobar, who worked on inference and previously spent 11 years at Meta.
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Zuckerberg also poached Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT and former lead scientist at OpenAI, and hired Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, to lead Meta’s SuperIntelligence group. Amodei recently said that some of his employees “wouldn’t even talk to Mark Zuckerberg.”
Some recent hiring and retention data sheds more insight into Anthropic’s evolving head count. Venture firm SignalFire found that Anthropic is hiring engineers around 2.68 times as fast as it is losing them, The Wall Street Journal reported, with a higher rate of hiring new engineers than losing them compared to OpenAI, Meta, and Google.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI employees, including Amodei, who shared the belief that AI had the potential for both ill and good. In 2023, the company published a 22-page document focused on growing AI responsibly. Amodei has been outspoken about the need for society to prepare for what he predicts will be massive white collar job losses in the near future as a result of AI advances — a view that other CEOs, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, have pushed back on.
Anthropic is often viewed as an AI safety-focused company, but its leader sees its mission as broader.
“I more want Anthropic to be a company where everyone is thinking about the public purpose, rather than a one-issue company that’s focused on AI safety or the misalignment of AI systems,” Amodei told Time in 2024. “Internally, I think we’ve succeeded at that, where we have people with a bunch of different perspectives, but what they share is a real commitment to the public purpose.”
