Many tech companies have announced layoffs over the past few months. In the case of Microsoft, (MSFT) it’s happened more than once.
The rise of artificial intelligence has upended the job market in undeniable ways, prompting companies to either completely automate away some positions or scale back their hiring in other areas while increasing their reliance on chatbots and AI agents.
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As more and more companies opt for job cuts and shift focus toward implementing an AI-first strategy, questions abound as to which jobs will survive this technology revolution. The number of companies embracing this method includes prominent names such as Shopify and Box.
Not every tech company is slashing its workforce, though. AI startup Anthropic isn’t slowing down on its hiring. In fact, it is successfully attracting talent for several industry leaders, launching a new battle for AI talent as the industry continues to boom.
Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has demonstrated clear success in retaining talent.
Kimberly White/Getty Images
The AI talent war shows David beating Goliath
Founded in 2021, Anthropic is still a fairly new company, although it is making waves in the AI market. Often considered a rival to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, it is best known for producing the Claude family, a group of large language models (LLMs) that have become extremely popular, particularly in the tech community.
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Anthropic describes itself as an AI safety and research company with a focus on creating “reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.” Most recently, though, it has been in the spotlight after CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI will wipe out many entry-level white-collar jobs.
Even so, Amodei’s own company is currently hiring workers for many different areas, including policy, finance, and marketing. But recent reports indicate that Anthropic has been on an engineering hiring spree as well lately, successfully poaching talent from two of its primary competitors.
Venture capital firm SignalFire recently released its State of Talent Report for 2025, in which it examined hiring trends in the tech sector. This year’s report showed that in an industry dependent on highly skilled engineers, Anthropic isn’t just successfully hiring the best talent; it is retaining it.
According to SignalFire’s data, 80% of the employees hired by Anthropic at least two years remain with the startup. While DeepMind is just behind it with a 78% retention rate, OpenAI trails both with only 78%, despite ChatGPT’s popularity among broad ranges of users.
As always, the numbers tell the story, and in this case, they highlight a compelling trend that is already shaping the future of AI. The report’s authors provide further context on engineers choosing Anthropic over its rivals, stating:
“OpenAI and DeepMind. Engineers are 8 times more likely to leave OpenAI for Anthropic than the reverse. From DeepMind, the ratio is nearly 11:1 in Anthropic’s favor. Some of that’s expected—Anthropic is the hot new startup, while DeepMind’s larger, tenured team is ripe for movement. But the scale of the shift is striking.”
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Tech professionals seeking out opportunities with innovative startups is nothing new. But in this case, all three companies are offering engineers opportunities to work on important projects. This raises the question of what Anthropic more appealing than its peers.
Anthropic’s hiring edge over its rivals
AI researcher and senior software engineer Nandita Giri, spoke to TheStreet about this trend, offering insight into why tech workers may be making these decisions. She sees it as being about far more than financial matters.
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“Anthropic is making serious investments in transparency tooling, scaling laws, and red-teaming infrastructure, which gives technical contributors greater ownership over how systems are evaluated and evolved,” she states. “Compared to OpenAI and DeepMind both of which are increasingly focused on product cycles Anthropic offers more freedom to pursue deep, foundational research.”
However, other experts speculate that it may be more than that. Wyatt Mayham, a lead consultant at Northwest AI, share some insights from his team, stating “What we’ve heard from clients is that it’s simply easier to work there with less burnout. More worklife balance if you will.”
Technology consultant Kate Scott adds that while all three companies are doing important work, she sees this trend as reflecting a shift in the broader industry, one that shows engineers seeking environments “where organizational purpose and daily execution feel closely aligned,” something that Anthropic seems to be offering.
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