OpenAI pays its UK employees an average compensation of over 2.3 million pounds.

As the global battle for AI talents intensifies, the compensation for employees of top-tier AI enterprises continues to rise. The latest financial data shows that the average total compensation of OpenAI's UK employees, the developer of ChatGPT, exceeded 2.3 million pounds in 2025, more than doubling from the previous year, with equity incentives accounting for nearly two thirds of the total.

According to comprehensive media reports, the financial statements submitted by OpenAI's British subsidiary OpenAI UK Ltd to the UK Companies House show that the company employed an average of 110 employees in 2025, with a total annual salary of about 87.3 million pounds and equity incentives of about 168 million pounds. The two items add up to about 255 million pounds, equivalent to an average total compensation of about 2.32 million pounds per capita.

Excluding equity incentives, the average wages and salaries of OpenAI's UK employees are about 794,000 pounds.

In other words, of the total wages and equity incentives of OpenAI's UK employees, about one third comes from wages and salaries, and the remaining nearly two thirds comes from share-based payments.

It should be noted that equity incentives are not equivalent to the actual cash income received, and their value and realization may be affected by factors such as equity vesting arrangements, company valuation and liquidity.

In contrast, the average total wages and equity compensation of OpenAI's UK employees in 2024 was about 1.1 million pounds, which has increased by more than double in 2025.

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that the average total compensation of OpenAI's UK employees is equivalent to about 58 times the median income of full-time employees in the UK. However, this comparison includes the equity incentives of OpenAI employees, while the ordinary employee income statistics mainly reflect wage remuneration.

However, the compensation gap among OpenAI's internal employees is quite significant, and not all employees can get such generous treatment. The highest compensation packages are mainly for top researchers involved in the development of cutting-edge AI models.

While the compensation cost has increased significantly, the business scale of OpenAI's British subsidiary has also expanded rapidly. Its operating revenue in 2025 reached 292.9 million pounds, an increase of about 270% from 79.2 million pounds in 2024; its pre-tax profit was 31.7 million pounds, and its after-tax profit was about 20.3 million pounds.

The above revenue comes from OpenAI's British subsidiary, not OpenAI's global revenue. This subsidiary mainly provides R&D, sales and marketing services to the group, and recognizes revenue through the intra-group cost-plus arrangement, so it cannot be directly regarded as the subscription or advertising revenue of ChatGPT in the UK market.

OpenAI is continuously expanding its business scale in the UK. At present, the company has about 200 employees in the UK, plans to set up a new office in the King's Cross area of London, and expand the staff size to more than 500.

London has become OpenAI's largest international research center. In addition to R&D personnel, the office also has government affairs, sales and marketing teams. Former British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was appointed as the head of OpenAI's global national cooperation program in December 2025, mainly responsible for promoting the company's cooperation with governments of various countries.

OpenAI's expansion comes at a time when global AI companies are competing fiercely for talents. In 2025, Meta was reported to have offered top AI researchers multi-year compensation packages worth hundreds of millions of pounds in total.

Competitor Anthropic is also stepping up its recruitment efforts in the UK market. The developer of Claude is expanding its business scale in the UK, and has rented a new office near Regent's Park in London, which can accommodate about 800 employees, four times the size of its previous London team.

The high-salary competition has even spread to non-technical positions. It was reported this week that Anthropic is recruiting a personal assistant for its London executives, offering an annual salary as high as 145,000 pounds. The company also previously hired former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as a consultant.

This article is from the WeChat official account "CLS", author: Xia Junxiong, published with authorization from 36Kr.