OpenAI and Anthropic escalated the battle for AI talent this week, poaching senior researchers from Apple and Google DeepMind as they race towards their upcoming IPOs where new billionaires could be minted.
OpenAI hired Paul Meade, who was in charge of Apple’s Vision Pro and smart glasses projects, in one of the highest-profile departures from Apple’s AI organization recently, according to Bloomberg News.
His move follows OpenAI’s recruitment of Noam Shazeer, Google’s Gemini co-lead and one of the co-authors of the landmark Transformer architecture that underpins today’s large language models.
Anthropic also continued its recruiting spree from Google DeepMind. Nobel Prize-winning scientist John Jumper, co-creator of AlphaFold, announced that he is leaving Google DeepMind to join the startup. Bloomberg said Gemini researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are departing Google DeepMind as well for Anthropic, adding more frontier AI expertise to the company’s research team.
In May, Anthropic hired OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI chief Andrej Karpathy to its pretraining team, where he is leading a new research group focused on accelerating frontier AI development using Claude.
Industry analysts estimate there are only a few hundred scientists worldwide with experience training the largest foundation models, making individual hires strategically significant, according to Reuters.
A 2025 report by venture capital firm SignalFire found engineers at OpenAI were eight times more likely to leave for Anthropic than vice versa, while engineers at Google DeepMind were nearly 11 times more likely to move to Anthropic.