Anthropic CEO: Employees join for money, not for the mission
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has expressed frustration over the trend of AI talent prioritizing financial compensation over the company's core mission.
Dario Amodei. Photo: CC-BY-TechCrunch
If you have checked LinkedIn lately, you have surely seen quite a few worried posts about layoffs in high-tech. However, there is a bubble within the bubble where the rules work very differently: the AI field. There, companies fight for every researcher, pouring in money and distributing equity as if there is no tomorrow. It now turns out that these 'games of thrones' have a price, and one of the most important figures in the field is starting to lose patience.
Harder to retain than to recruit
According to an Axios report, the war for talent in the AI field continues with full force. Companies are finding it difficult not only to recruit the right employees but, primarily, to retain them. The industry operates as a shared ecosystem: companies compete on products, try to poach talent, and simultaneously invest in each other, all while struggling over a pool of a few hundred researchers who continue to drive up their own salaries. This ping-pong leads to companies paying repeatedly for the same employees and their onboarding periods, while projects get stuck halfway because the workforce simply moves on.
Take the example of Lilian Weng, a co-founder alongside Mira Murati at Thinking Machines—a startup she launched after leaving OpenAI with significant media buzz. Weng initially claimed she was leaving because the co-founder role was affecting her health and she was seeking a more focused position. A few days later, it was reported that she was returning to OpenAI, becoming the fourth co-founder of Thinking Machines to leave the company in the last year. If the founders are leaving, who will remain loyal? And, of course, one cannot forget Noam Shazeer, who returned to Google for $3 billion only to leave it again for OpenAI.
Money over mission
A source close to the matter at Anthropic reported to Axios that the company's CEO, Dario Amodei, is frustrated, claiming that new talent joins only for the money, not for the 'mission.' This realization comes against the backdrop of employees joining companies like Anthropic and OpenAI while demanding equity ahead of a long-awaited IPO. Experts explain that AI researchers are trying to maximize short-term profits for fear that in the future, as many developers have already discovered, AI systems themselves will diminish their market value. In other words, employees realize they are creating systems that may eventually make them redundant, so they are 'exploiting' the situation to prepare for the coming storm.
This means that values like 'the mission' are pushed aside. It is ironic, given that Anthropic itself is considered one of the companies most willing to open its wallet aggressively.
However, some experts note that senior researchers also leave for other reasons, such as available computing power (the number of gigawatts a company possesses), potential impact on products, professional freedom, and even ethical choices, such as working with the Pentagon or adhering to strict guidelines. Until tech companies stop handing out blank checks, it will be difficult for them to find employees who come solely for the 'mission.'
