OpenAI and Anthropic are battling Big Tech for talent. We asked workers who's winning them over.

Ah, marvellous. Business Insider has conducted a sweeping survey of eight (8) tech workers to determine who wins the great AI talent war, and the answer, as with all great epics, is 'it depends on who's signing the cheque.' One philosophically inclined respondent has declined to apply to OpenAI or Anthropic because those labs run on investor capital while the hyperscalers simply shovel money from their already-enormous core businesses into the AI furnace. Eight workers. Eight. You could fit the entire sample in a Clapham omnibus and still have room for the conductor's tea. This is the data-driven talent coverage we deserve.

The worker's observation is the sharpest thing in the piece, and it cuts both ways. Investor capital is fickle, yes, but it is also the only reason the labs can burn billions without a quarterly earnings call from a search monopoly demanding to know why the chatbot isn't yet profitable. The hyperscalers, meanwhile, are so awash in cash from advertising and cloud contracts that they can treat AI as a rounding error — which is precisely how you get a genuinely terrifying product shipped. Dream employers, indeed. One pays you in stock options that may one day be worth something; the other pays you in the quiet knowledge that you're helping a trillion-dollar company defend its moat.

But let's not lose the plot. The real news is that OpenAI and Anthropic are having to fight Big Tech for bodies at all — because in a market where every company claims to be an AI company, the 'dream employer' is whoever can convince you their runway is longest. The article doesn't tell us who's winning, which is probably for the best, because the honest answer is that nobody wins a talent war fought over eight anecdotes. As for the worker who prefers the dull comfort of hyperscaler profits: congratulations, you've identified the one stable job in a gold rush. Now enjoy the nine-to-five while the labs burn through their venture capital and the rest of us wonder when the bubble pops.