Anthropic billionaire CEO Dario Amodei says many of his employees are turning down Meta’s $100 million poaching offers, adding they “wouldn’t even talk to Mark Zuckerberg.” And the tech titan isn’t willing to fight fire with fire by raising his own star staffers’ salaries to convince them to stay at the $61.5 billion AI company, saying it’s “unfair” and could hurt company culture. Amodei and other Silicon Valley CEOs, including Sam Altman, have criticized Meta’s strategy as being a killer for company culture.
Tech companies like Meta and Google have waged an all-out talent war in the fight to build the next revolutionary AI—but Anthropic’s stars aren’t being won over by the promise of $100 million pay packages.
“Relative to other companies, a lot fewer people from Anthropic have been caught by these. And it’s not for lack of trying,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently revealed on the Big Technology Podcast. “I’ve talked to plenty of people who got these offers at Anthropic and who just turned them down. Who wouldn’t even talk to Mark Zuckerberg.”
Meta’s been on a tear to dominate AI—and if it can’t grow the talent internally, its CEO Zuckerberg has no qualms about buying it instead. In June, reports revealed that he’s been poaching staff at competitor companies (including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic) with $100 million signing bonuses, in an effort to beef up his “superintelligence” AI lab.
Some have taken up his envy-inducing offer, including at least seven staffers from OpenAI, but Amodei insisted that most of his employees haven’t taken the bait—and he’s not throwing money at staff to keep them.
Employers may be tempted to fight fire with fire by raising their AI stars’ salaries or recruiting others in return—but Anthropic thinks it would hurt its company culture.
“We are not willing to compromise our compensation principles, our principles of fairness, to respond individually to these offers,” Amodei said. “The way things work at Anthropic is there’s a series of levels. One candidate comes in, they get assigned a level, and we don’t negotiate that level, because we think it’s unfair. We want to have a systematic way.”
Amodei not only thinks that it’s unfair to raise salaries to have his workers stick around, but that it could actually backfire on his billion-dollar company’s mission. In actuality, staying true to his compensation practices amid the poaching chaos has been a win for Anthropic’s culture.
“I think actually this was a unifying moment for the company where we didn’t give in. We refused to compromise our principles, because we had the confidence that people are Anthropic because they truly believe in the mission,” Amodei continued.
