What OpenAI Researcher Salaries Tell Us About The AI Talent Battle
Top research talent can command $10 million-plus yearly salaries to switch teams like it's the NBA. Upstarts obtained OpenAI's salary bands as part of a startup's cheat sheet to the roster moves.
The Upshot
The opening of free agency is an exciting moment for franchises and their fans. While team-building can prove a painful and years-long process, signing the right star can turn around a team’s trajectory for years.
The elite talent we’re talking about, of course: PhD researchers at AI labs.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman helped to kick off the AI free agency news cycle when he claimed that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta were offering key OpenAI employees compensation packages of $100 million or more. Wired has since reported that a few employees received offers far beyond that (Meta pushed back on that claim).
As top AI researchers have taken Zuck’s offers and others, like Anysphere hiring away two leaders from Anthropic’s Claude Code team, daily tech show TBPN captured the zeitgeist by creating loud graphics announcing the moves – a nod to the current master of NBA personnel news, Shams Charania, who breaks each signing with a precision that includes naming the sports agent who negotiated the deal.
Agent-speak in AI is still about autonomous software, not talent brokers – but the current moment of high-profile PhD poaching might have its own analog there, too. On Monday, investor Sarah Guo went viral on X: “Not yet written about, but funny - there are now folks helping researchers negotiate their comp packages and taking a fee. like agents for athletes”.
Challenge accepted! Upstarts reached out to Guo for comment – she demurred – and pinged a few tech talent negotiation experts to ask what’s going on, and what it means for the ecosystem. Our key takeaways for startups are below.
As a bonus, we got our hands on the basic state of play for compensation tiers within OpenAI – how much these in-demand AI athletes are typically making, and the basic mechanisms OpenAI uses to try to sweeten the deal.
OpenAI declined to comment.