AI Startup Salaries Revealed: How OpenAI and Anthropic Pay in 2025

Do you hear that? The groans. The thuds of heads hitting desks. That’s the sound of workers mourning their choice to study English, psychology, or anything other than computer science, as a hiring war in tech escalates and AI engineers write their own tickets.

As Big Tech and startups race to dominate the next frontier of artificial intelligence, they’re offering money, perks, and equity to a limited pool of technical talent who will join them.

Tech salaries range from eye-popping to borderline obscene. At OpenAI, technical staff can pull in up to $530,000 a year, according to data from federal filings. Over at Anthropic, research engineers earn up to $690,000. Even software engineers at garden-variety unicorns — venture-backed companies worth at least one billion — routinely make $250,000.

The numbers come from filings that companies must submit to the Department of Labor when hiring foreign workers through the H-1B visa program, which allows them to bring in 85,000 specialized workers annually through a lottery system.

Because tech companies typically guard their compensation details closely, these government-mandated disclosures provide a peek into pay scales. The numbers reflect annual salaries alone, excluding the stock options, signing bonuses, and other perks that can often double or triple total compensation packages.

For this list, Business Insider pulled filings from some of the top AI startups valued at over $2 billion, excluding companies in robotics, defense, and autonomous driving. See how your salary stacks up against someone’s from Cohere, Glean, Thinking Machines Lab, and more.

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