- As big tech companies and AI labs are battling it out for top talent.
- Anthropic has the highest employee retention rate among frontier AI labs, according to SignalFire’s 2025 State of Talent Report.
- As of May 2026, the company has lured top talent from major tech companies including OpenAI, xAI, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, including OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and Microsoft Azure AI president Eric Boyd.
When Meta began luring researchers from frontier AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI nine-figure salaries to leave their jobs and join its new superintelligence lab, Dario Amodei didn’t seem to be bothered.
Rather than matching the offers, the founder and CEO of Anthropic said that his team was “not willing to compromise our compensation principles.”
“If Mark Zuckerberg throws a dart at a dartboard and it hits your name, that doesn’t mean that you should be paid 10 times more than the guy next to you who’s just as skilled, just as talented,” Amodei said on an episode of the Big Technology Podcast.
“What they are doing is trying to buy something that cannot be bought, and that is alignment with the mission.”
According to SignalFire’s 2025 State of Talent Report, Anthropic retains 80% of employees hired in the last two years. It is the highest rate of any frontier AI lab, ahead of DeepMind at 78%, OpenAI at 67%, and Meta itself at 64%.
The direction of movement across the industry is just as telling. According to the same report, engineers at OpenAI are eight times more likely to leave for Anthropic than the reverse – with the ratio for DeepMind being 11:1, in Anthropic’s favour.
“If I ask any candidate, ‘what is the dream company you have at this point?’ Anthropic is named more often than anyone else,” Heather Doshay, a partner at SignalFire, told the Wall Street Journal in April of last year.
The AI lab is going through a growth spurt, having announced its first London office — one of now six European sites it has announced in year. It is also rumoured to be seeking a $30 billion funding round at $900 billion valuation, just months after closing record Series G.
The names joining Anthropic in 2026 now span OpenAI, Microsoft, xAI, Google and Apple. Using data provided by Live Data Technologies and public information, Tech Funding News charted Anthropic’s top hires of the year – so far.
Open AI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joined May
When Andrej Karpathy announced he was joining Anthropic, his X post drew millions of views within hours and became one of the most talked-about hires in AI this year.
Karpathy co-founded OpenAI, previously led Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-driving vision team as director of AI, and founded Eureka Labs, an AI education startup.
Now, he is tasked with building out a new “pre-training” team that will be focused on how Claude learns at its earliest stages of development.
“The next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” he wrote in the announcement.
xAI’s Ross Nordeen joined May
Ross Nordeen is a founding member of xAI and the last of its 11 co-founders to leave as the company restructured under SpaceX.
Nordeen previously built supercomputing capacity at Tesla before joining Anthropic in May to oversee the computing power and expansion needed to train and run its AI models.
The announcement came the same day as Anthropic’s deal to use xAI’s Colossus supercomputer.
Richard Quach joined May, saying goodbye to Uber
Richard Quach joined Anthropic in May with more than 20 years of experience in real estate acquisitions, development and project management, most recently at Uber where he led real estate design and construction globally.
At Anthropic, Quach is expected to oversee the design and build-out of the company’s offices worldwide as it continues expanding across multiple continents.
Microsoft Azure AI president Eric Boyd moved in April
Eric Boyd spent nearly 17 years at Microsoft, most recently as president of AI Platform, overseeing around 1,500 people and the compute infrastructure supporting both OpenAI and Anthropic’s models on Azure.
Boyd joined Anthropic in April2026 to lead the infrastructure team responsible for keeping its models running reliably as demand grows.
“AI is accelerating at an incredible pace, and the impact of Claude Code in the last 6 months, and particularly the last two months, just shows the power of what is possible,” Boyd wrote in his announcement on LinkedIn.
Google finance transformation head Golubina Markovikj joined April
Golubina Markovikj spent nearly four years leading finance transformation at Google, with previous roles at Cohesity, DataStax and Deloitte.
Markovikj joined Anthropic in April as head of the Transformation Management Office, which is responsible for building the financial infrastructure behind Anthropic’s mission.
OpenAI-backed 1X finance director Sophia Marquez moved over in March
Sophia Marquez spent over a decade at Apple across a range of senior finance roles, including senior finance manager for AppleCare and senior finance manager for Commodities, where she supported Apple’s global supply chain.
She then joined 1X, an OpenAI-backed humanoid robotics company, as finance director and head of Engineering and Operations.
Marquez joined Anthropic in March 2026 as director of Compute Infrastructure Procurement, a role that, based on her title, would involve sourcing chips and managing supplier relationships as the company scales its AI infrastructure across multiple hardware platforms.
STACK Infrastructure’s Tim Hughes joined February
Tim Hughes joined Anthropic in February 2026 from STACK Infrastructure, where he built data centres for major technology clients as chief development officer.
Previously, Hughes spent over eight years at Facebook in data centre roles. At Anthropic, he now secures the land, leases and power supply needed to build the company’s physical infrastructure.
Google VP of Global Strategic Security Programs Mike Fein joined February
Mike Fein’s previous role was VP of global strategic security programs at Google.
In February 2026, he took on the security function at Anthropic – now a $380 billion company with offices across multiple continents and a public dispute with the Pentagon – spanning executive protection, investigations, travel security and crisis management.
Natasha Darcy Souza joined January from Stripe
Natasha Darcy Souza joined Anthropic in January 2026, bringing experience from Google Cloud and Stripe, where she most recently served as global lead for leadership enablement.
Now as head of international go to market, Souza is responsible for supporting the company’s commercial teams as it expands into new markets globally.
Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose joined January
Irina Ghose spent more than three decades scaling technology businesses, most recently as managing director of Microsoft India.
Ghose joined Anthropic in January 2026 to lead the company’s first India office in Bengaluru, which is its second-largest market globally for Claude, with nearly half of all usage concentrated in technical and mathematical tasks.
