Not even big offers from Meta were enough to tempt the team at Anthropic, said the AI startup’s cofounder, Benjamin Mann.
“It’s not a hard choice,” Mann said on an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published Sunday.
Other AI startups have seen key talent poached by mega paydays.
“I think we’ve been maybe much less affected than many of the other companies in the space because people here are so mission-oriented,” he said. “They get these offers and then they say, ‘Well, of course I’m not going to leave because my best case scenario at Meta is that we make money, and my best case at Anthropic is we affect the future of humanity.”
Mann also said he doesn’t blame anyone who takes those “mega offers.”
“Other people have different life circumstances,” he said.
His comments come as tech giants like Meta and OpenAI engage in a fierce talent war, offering massive payouts to top AI researchers.
“I’m pretty sure it’s real,” Mann said, referring to Meta’s $100 million signing bonuses offered to AI engineers.
“To pay individuals like $100 million over a four-year package, that’s actually pretty cheap compared to the value created for the business,” he said. “We’re just in an unprecedented era of scale, and it’s only going to get crazier.”
Mann also said that he and several other leaders left OpenAI in 2020 to start Anthropic because “safety wasn’t the top priority there.”
A former researcher told Fortune last year that nearly half of OpenAI’s safety team had exited.
“People who are primarily focused on thinking about AGI safety and preparedness are being increasingly marginalized,” said Daniel Kokotajlo, a former governance researcher.
OpenAI said safety remains central to its mission. “Our responsibility to prepare for emerging security threats to users, customers, and global communities shapes everything we do,” the company said on its website.
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The tech giant added that its API and ChatGPT products undergo routine third-party testing to “identify security weaknesses before they can be exploited by malicious actors.”
Mann, Anthropic, and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Bidding war for top AI talent
Big Tech has always paid top dollar for elite talent, but the latest AI hiring frenzy has taken things to a whole new level, as BI previously reported.
It started when Meta recruited Scale’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, last month as part of a $14.3 billion deal to take a 49% stake in his company. Then, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said Meta had tried to poach his best employees with $100 million signing bonuses. Meta pushed back, saying that the signing bonuses were not that generous.
Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced last month that Wang would co-lead a new superintelligence unit with six top researchers from OpenAI.
The bidding war for top AI talent has been likened to sports franchises competing for star athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo.
Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, said on a podcast published Thursday that Big Tech companies need to ensure that employees are motivated by mission as well as money.
“You’re encountering new kinds of challenges. You feel a lot of growth, you’re learning new things. And you’re getting richer, too, along the way. Why would you want to go just because you have some guaranteed payments?” he said.
Srinivas also said that he was “surprised by the magnitude” of the salaries Zuckerberg is reportedly offering to top AI researchers, adding that it “seems like it’s needed at this point for them.”
With the massive salaries, “failure is not an option” for Meta’s new team, Srinivas said.
