AI Startups: What OpenAI, Anthropic Pay Their Technical Staff

OpenAI, Anthropic and Thinking Machines are reportedly paying big dollars for technical staff — but the compensation is far from the eye-watering sums of up to $100 million from Meta.

OpenAI is paying salaries of $200,000 to $530,000 a year to 29 technical staffers, according to Business Insider, which cited federal filings required for hiring people who need H-1B visas to work in the U.S.

Anthropic has shelled out $300,000 to $690,000 to 14 people, per the report.

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s startup, Thinking Machines Lab, is paying $450,000 to $500,000 to four technical staffers.

These figures are base salaries and do not include sign-up bonuses or stock options or grants.

The federal filings were made before Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s hiring spree that saw the company pay $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI and hire away its co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that Meta is offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million with even larger annual compensation packages. But Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth reportedly said Altman was being “dishonest” by implying the nine-figure offer is for “every single person.”

Read more: Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Announces Launch of Thinking Machines Lab

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup, xAI, has reportedly raised $10 billion in debt and equity.

According to CNBC, half of the funds are in secured notes and term loans and the rest through a strategic equity investment. The news outlet cited Morgan Stanley as the source of the information.

Morgan Stanley said the funds raised will be used to support xAI’s “continued development of cutting edge AI solutions, including one of the world’s largest data centers and its flagship Grok platform.”

The latest debt offering was said to be “oversubscribed,” meaning there was more demand than supply, and included “prominent global debt investors.”

XAI’s funding round comes as leading AI startups are raising capital in the billions, stratospheric sums compared to what startups have raised historically.

The startup expects to spend $13 billion this year while bringing in $500 million in revenues.

AI companies that are building foundation or frontier models typically have to spend billions due to the intense workloads needed to keep training their models using special AI chips like GPUs. But those building applications on top of these models don’t need such high sums.

In March, xAI bought X (formerly Twitter) for $45 billion to create a generative AI-powered content platform.

Meanwhile, Meta is reportedly trying to raise $29 billion from private investors to build AI data centers in the U.S.

According to the FT, $3 billion would come from investors including Apollo Global Management, KKR, Brookfield, Carlyle and Pimco. The rest would be raised in a debt offering.

Read more:

Report: New Valuation Push for Elon Musk’s xAI

Meta’s Recent AI Hires to Lead New ‘Superintelligence Labs’ Unit

Ex-OpenAI Tech Chief Raises $2 Billion for New AI Startup

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