Anthropic is poaching talents with 6 times the salary, but its CEO worries that new employees "only come for the money", and he is mocked by netizens: Then try cutting your salary.
"If it's really all about the mission, slash salaries down to the bare minimum and see how many people are still willing to join."
Recently, a debate over "whether AI talents are driven by ideals or wealth" has sparked heated discussions across developer communities. The figure at the center of this controversy is none other than Dario Amodei, the star AI entrepreneur who left OpenAI to found Anthropic.
According to Axios reports, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently expressed concerns to people around him: some new employees joining Anthropic may be drawn more by high salaries than by their alignment with the company's long-term mission of "building advanced AI safely".
This remark immediately triggered widespread controversy among internet users. The reason is simple: Anthropic itself is currently one of the companies in the AI industry that spends the most aggressively to poach talent.
An AI giant that is willing to offer annual salaries of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars is now worrying that its employees "value money too much" — this sense of contradiction strikes many people as absurd.
Dario Amodei Fears Some People Join Anthropic Merely For High Pay
As is well known, as competition in the large model sector enters a white-hot phase, AI labs across the globe are vying for an extremely small pool of top-tier talents. Companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta are all scrambling to recruit outstanding researchers, and these talents have thus gained unprecedented bargaining power.
Over the past few years, the salaries of AI researchers have risen to staggering levels.
Relevant data shows that the annual salary of a regular machine learning engineer usually ranges from 180,000 to 350,000 US dollars, while in top-tier AI labs, the total compensation of senior researchers can easily exceed one million US dollars. In addition to base cash salaries, many companies also offer a large amount of stock, options and pre-IPO equity opportunities.
Therefore, for some AI researchers, this may be the period when the value of their technical skills is at its highest.
Since its inception, Anthropic has always emphasized its mission: to develop advanced AI systems safely and prevent AI technology from getting out of control. This was also one of the key reasons why Dario Amodei left OpenAI back then.
At that time, he believed that after OpenAI partnered with Microsoft, it became increasingly commercialized, which might undermine the company's original focus on AI safety. As a result, Anthropic is widely regarded as a more "mission-driven" AI company by many people.
But now, as the company's valuation keeps climbing, this philosophy is starting to face real-world challenges. As mentioned at the beginning, Dario Amodei worries that some new employees join Anthropic not because they endorse the AI safety concept, but because the company offers extremely attractive compensation packages.
For an AI company whose valuation has approached 100 billion US dollars or even higher, this seems to have become a new kind of headache: too much money may also attract people who only care about money.
Ironically, Anthropic Itself Is Also Aggressively Offering Sky-High Salaries
Very soon, Dario Amodei's idea of "worrying that employees join for money" drew a lot of ridicule: Anthropic itself is a major player competing for AI talents with high salaries.
Reports say that Anthropic once recruited a head of brand marketing campaign, offering an annual salary range as high as 320,000 to 400,000 US dollars; but according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual salary for meeting, event and exhibition planners in the U.S. in 2024 was around 59,400 US dollars.
In other words, the salary Anthropic offers for this position is roughly 6 times the industry average.
This makes many people wonder: if a company actively attracts talents with salaries far higher than the market level, how can it accuse employees of being drawn by money? Moreover, in the real workplace, salary is inherently a core factor for talents to choose employers.
In response to this, one netizen commented: "He can give it a try, slash employee salaries down to the minimum wage level and see who really comes for the mission. Of course, that's also the fastest way to lose all your top talents." Another netizen joked: "I wonder what exactly this 'mission' he talks about is — is it the money in his bank account?"
Apart from the salary issue, some comments have pointed out deeper problems: technology companies are creating more and more wealth, yet the gap between senior corporate executives and ordinary employees is also widening.
"The more people I meet who have achieved financial freedom, the more I feel they seem to be increasingly disconnected from ordinary society. Similarly, many executives can no longer understand the basic economic laws that ordinary employees have to face to make a living."
This is especially true in the AI industry. For ordinary employees, high salaries not only mean growing wealth, but also mean greater resilience against future uncertainties — because AI is transforming the job market itself.
He Once Predicted AI Could Eliminate Half of Entry-Level Jobs, So Is It Reasonable for Employees to Pursue High Pay?
There is one more thing: previously, Dario Amodei himself made very radical predictions about AI's impact on employment.
He once stated that AI may replace a large number of junior office jobs in the next few years, and even affect half of all entry-level white-collar positions — if this prediction eventually comes true, it is not hard to understand why some employees choose to join leading AI companies to accumulate as much wealth as possible.
After all, when AI is transforming the entire labor market, who would refuse to stand at the center of the technological wave?
For many AI talents, joining a company like Anthropic can satisfy two needs at the same time:
● On the one hand, they hope to participate in driving the development of next-generation AI technology;
● On the other hand, they also hope to obtain the economic returns brought by the rapid growth of the industry.
But this actually reflects an increasingly obvious problem: do top talents belong to the company, or to the entire AI era?
Nowadays, major labs can attract researchers with high salaries, equity and computing power resources, but it is difficult to ensure that they stay for the long term, because top AI talents have too many options: they can switch to competitors, or start their own new companies.
For AI labs, the real challenge is not to find outstanding talents, but to build a strong enough culture and sense of purpose that makes these people willing to stay long-term — after all, money can buy these talents' time, but gaining their long-term loyalty may require much more.
Reference links:
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/03/ai-talent-wars-openai-google-meta-anthropic
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenAI4all/comments/1vg3rjb/half_of_all_anthropic_new_hires_could_just_be/
This article is from the WeChat official account "CSDN", compiled by Zheng Liyuan, published with authorization from 36Kr.