Anthropic’s £630K London Salary Sparks “Brutal” Talent War for Tech Startups

The battle for artificial intelligence talent has reached what industry insiders are calling "sports team level economics," a new report in The Times claims. 

As U.S. giants Anthropic and OpenAI aggressively expand their London footprints, the cost of hiring elite engineers is reaching levels that threaten to sideline even the most successful local "unicorns." 

Anthropic is currently advertising for machine learning research engineers in London with base salaries of up to £630,000 ($780,000). When stock options and bonuses are factored in, the total compensation package moves closer to the million-dollar mark—nearly five times the average salary for a senior UK engineer. 

With Anthropic scaling to a new 800-person office in King's Cross and OpenAI doubling its headcount to over 500, London’s "Knowledge Quarter" has become an impossibly expensive neighborhood for startups to recruit in.

The distortion of the market is forcing local founders to get creative. “The salaries are brutal,” one startup founder told The Times in the report, noting that they are often forced to raise funding rounds prematurely just to afford a single senior hire.