Revealing the daily salaries of interns at AI giants: Anthropic offers more than 5000 yuan, while Kimi only ranks in the fourth tier

In 2026, the "baseline" of internship salaries for domestic college students is that the median monthly salary is 5,000 yuan, and the figure can reach 10,000 yuan for technical positions in first-tier cities.

I, who accepted the bonus of the era and the fact that I picked the wrong major early on, didn't feel much jealousy at first, until I saw the news that —

An intern at a certain AI company earns more than 5,000 yuan a day... One day? 5000 yuan?

I was totally shocked. I looked up the daily salaries of interns at 12 global AI giants, from OpenAI, Anthropic to ByteDance, DeepSeek, cross-checked the information from official recruitment pages, platforms like levels.fyi, Glassdoor (Note from Odaily Planet Daily: salary query websites, similar to the U.S. version of Boss Zhipin + Maimai) and employee leaks on domestic social media.

I found that such high salaries are not unique to one company. It can only be said that: The war for talent in the AI industry has entered a white-hot stage.

Next, I mixed domestic and foreign leading AI companies and made a ranking list from extremely high-paying to relatively high-paying (there is no "low-paying" level at all), which may completely subvert your impression of the word "intern".

Ceiling Level: These are not interns doing trivial work, but distinguished AI researchers

Let's start with the top two "dream positions", both of which have a daily salary exceeding 5,000 yuan.

No.1, OpenAI Residency, with a daily salary of about 5,625 yuan.

The monthly salary is 18,333 US dollars, equivalent to more than 120,000 RMB. This is clearly stated on OpenAI's official website, marked on pages of all languages, which is completely confirmed.

This is a 6-month full-time research program. Once admitted, you will be directly assigned to core teams such as large models, reinforcement learning, alignment, and safety, work alongside full-time researchers, and can convert to a full-time position after the project ends.

To put it bluntly, this is OpenAI's "genius youth reserve program", cultivating the mainstay of the future AI industry who will dedicate themselves to the AGI cause. As for the working environment, you will work directly at OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters, go to the office at least 3 days a week, and the treatment is almost equivalent to that of internal OpenAI researchers.

Of course, these researchers are all top talents selected from the best. OpenAI has recently launched a short-term "Safety Intern" training program similar to Anthropic's top intern program, which will be open from September 14, 2026 to February 5, 2027.

No.2, Anthropic AI Safety Fellows, with a daily salary of about 5,198 yuan.

The weekly salary is 3,850 US dollars, which is clearly marked on Anthropic's official website and official alignment blog, and it is the most credible data in this survey.

This is a 4-month program with 40 working hours per week. In addition to the salary, each person will be given an additional 15,000 US dollars of computing power funding per month — Yes, you read that right, it is computing power funding, 15,000 US dollars a month, you can use it as you want. This is also a special benefit for leading AI companies, which has partially realized "Token freedom".

What is the level of the first batch of trainees? More than 80% of them have published papers, and more than 40% have directly converted to full-time positions. What's more outrageous is the salary increase: the weekly salary of the first batch in 2024 was only 2,100 US dollars, and it directly rose to 3,850 in 2026, an increase of more than 80% in two years. You can see how scarce top AI talents are from this increase.

These two positions have one thing in common: extremely high threshold, very few vacancies, essentially "pre-recruitment" — under the name of interns, they are competing for top researchers of the future.

Extremely High Pay: Interns at U.S. Tech Giants Earn More in a Week Than Most People Earn in a Month

After looking at the ceiling, let's look at regular interns at U.S. tech giants. Note that it is "regular", not any special talent program.

Meta, daily salary is about 3,780 yuan. The hourly salary is 70 US dollars, which is mutually verified by two sources levels.fyi and Glassdoor. One reports 70 US dollars, the other reports 56 to 82 US dollars (average 67 US dollars), the numbers are roughly the same. The official JD writes that the monthly salary range is 7188~12134 US dollars, and there is an additional housing subsidy of about 2600 US dollars per month.

Google, daily salary is about 3,400 yuan. The hourly salary is 62.98 US dollars. The annual salary for undergraduate positions is equivalent to 92,000 to 122,000 US dollars, and 113,000 to 150,000 US dollars for doctoral positions. There are differences in different regions. The hourly salary at the Mountain View headquarters is about 56.73 US dollars, and around 50 US dollars in Seattle.

NVIDIA U.S., daily salary is about 2,106 yuan. This is the average, with an hourly salary of 39 US dollars, but the range of NVIDIA's official JD is very wide, from 20 to 71 US dollars for undergraduate SWE positions, and 30 to 94 US dollars for doctoral research positions — if you are a PhD, the upper limit of hourly salary is 94 US dollars, and the daily salary directly rushes to more than 5000 yuan.

OpenAI non-technical intern, daily salary is about 1,944 yuan. The GTM strategy intern has an hourly salary of only 36 US dollars, which is only about 60% of the hourly salary of technical interns, but it still belongs to the second echelon in the technology field.

Did you find that? As an ordinary technical intern at a U.S. tech giant, the money you earn in a week may be more than the monthly salary of many white-collar elites in China.

Top Tier: Domestic Tech Giants Are Catching Up Fast, ByteDance Offers 2,000 Yuan a Day

After talking about the United States, let's look at China.

Chinese tech giants' investment in top talents has begun to quickly approach that of U.S. AI giants.

ByteDance Top Seed Research Intern Special Program, daily salary is 2000 yuan.

Yes, you read that right, 2000 yuan a day, which is no less than the monthly salary of most ordinary people.

The original words of media reports are: "Compared with the 500 yuan a day internship salary offered by DeepSeek, ByteDance raised the standard to 2000 yuan a day." This figure was later repeatedly confirmed by more internet media. Calculated based on 20 working days per month, the monthly salary is 40,000 yuan.

Who are recruited for this program? Top on-campus master and doctoral students. After admission, they can set their own research topics, have the same authority as full-time employees, and the mentor team includes WU Yonghui, the vice president of research poached from Google DeepMind in February 2025.

Some people put it bluntly: ByteDance's unified standard of 500 yuan a day for ordinary interns "does not include high-end talent programs such as Jinfdouyun and TopSeed, and the salaries of such programs are generally higher".

Xiaomi Top Intern - Large Model Training Framework, daily salary 500 to 1000 yuan; Agent Researcher - MiMo, daily salary 1000-1100 yuan.

The positions posted on recruitment websites are mainly for postgraduate students, and the work content includes participating in the development of large model training engines with hundreds of billions of parameters, agent research, etc.

In contrast, ordinary large model algorithm interns at Xiaomi only get 300 to 400 yuan a day — in the same company, the gap is more than double.

This is the current situation of China's AI industry: Ordinary positions follow the market price, but as long as you are a "top talent", money is not a problem.

Average Tier: The "Four AI Dragons" with Unlimited Opportunities, Kimi, Zhipu AI and Others Are Still Working Hard

All the above are games for a small number of top talents. What is the actual salary level that the vast majority of AI interns get?

Odaily Planet Daily selects several of the most popular "representative AI manufacturers" to illustrate.

DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek), ordinary AGI large model intern, daily salary 500 to 1000 yuan. This figure has been confirmed by many media reports, and it is also public information on DeepSeek's recruitment platform. Non-local interns will get an additional 3000 yuan housing subsidy per month. Calculated based on 22 working days, the monthly salary ranges from 11,000 to 22,000 yuan.

By the way, the deep learning researcher of DeepSeek's full-time employees has a monthly salary of 80,000 to 110,000 yuan, with 14-month pay, and the maximum annual salary is 1.54 million yuan — there is an order of magnitude gap between interns and full-time employees.

In addition, the previously exposed "DeepSeek intern from Tsinghua University Yao Class with a pre-tax daily salary of 5500 yuan" on social media platforms is obviously an extremely rare special case among thousands of people, we will not discuss it too much for now, and we will talk about it in detail later.

ByteDance ordinary R&D/algorithm intern, daily salary 500 yuan. Starting from January 1 this year, ByteDance unified the daily salary of interns in technical and product positions under its banner to 500, under the name of "increasing investment in talents, improving salary competitiveness, and increasing the intensity of option incentives", "to ensure that employee compensation competitiveness and incentive returns are ahead of the top level in all markets around the world".

Of course, according to the convention of internet giants, meals for three times a day are included, there is a housing subsidy, and some AI positions can reach 550 yuan.

MiniMax, multimodal/algorithm intern, daily salary 350 to more than 600 yuan. Technical positions are generally 350 to 500 yuan, master SP can reach more than 600 yuan; operation and non-technical positions are only 150 to 200 yuan. MiniMax has an incentive feature of a startup company: close to full employee stock ownership, almost all of the 385 employees have shares, so although the cash salary is not the highest, the comprehensive income may not be bad.

Alibaba Qwen AI R&D, daily salary 350 to 550 yuan. 350 yuan for undergraduates, 400 yuan for postgraduates, plus an additional 2000 yuan housing subsidy per month; AI Agent development positions can reach 450 to 600 yuan, AI R&D engineers 500 to 550 yuan. There is also a one-week free accommodation welfare arrangement for off-site recruits.

NVIDIA China, deep learning architecture/CUDA intern, daily salary 400 to 800 yuan. For positions on recruitment websites, ordinary test positions only get 250 to 300 yuan.

Kimi (Moonshot AI), search and recommendation algorithm/RL intern position, daily salary 400 to 450 yuan. The daily salary of product operation positions is 250 to 350 yuan. Although Kimi has gained a lot of momentum after the release of K3, with smooth external development and corporate financing, the intern salary is really not high — but it has prepared the "Traversal Plan" for top talents of the 2027 graduation year, and directly issues options. In addition, more than 90% of the company's recruited positions have a monthly salary of more than 30,000 yuan, the average salary of master's students exceeds 44,000 yuan, and the treatment of full-time employees is relatively good.

Xiaomi ordinary large model algorithm intern, daily salary 300 to 400 yuan. This is the position mentioned earlier, whose salary is more than half lower than that of "top interns", but in the current employment environment, it is already at the top level.

Zhipu AI, large model algorithm framework intern, daily salary 200 to 300 yuan. The cash salary is the lowest level in this survey. But don't feel bad for them — Zhipu AI's employee shareholding ratio exceeds 51%, 452 out of 883 employees have equity. When the market value was 323.2 billion Hong Kong dollars, the core backbones had a book value of over 100 million yuan, and ordinary shareholding employees also had a net worth of tens of millions of yuan. Cash is less, options make up for it, it depends on whether interns are willing to take this "pie".

The Truth Behind DeepSeek's 5,500 Yuan Daily Salary for Interns: Don't Treat Geniuses as Ordinary Labor

Here, we must specifically talk about the widely spread DeepSeek 5500 yuan/day news.