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When top engineers at Anthropic started receiving job offers from tech giants like Meta, Dario Amodei made one thing clear: The company wouldn’t play the bidding war game.
On the “Big Technology Podcast” published Wednesday, Anthropic’s CEO said he posted a message to staff declaring the company was “not willing to compromise our compensation principles, our principles of fairness” in response to outside offers.
He said Anthropic uses a level-based compensation system.
“When a candidate comes in, they get assigned a level, and we don’t negotiate that level,” Amodei said. “We think it’s unfair. We want to have a systematic way.”
“If Mark Zuckerberg throws a dart at a dartboard and hits your name, that doesn’t mean you should be paid 10 times more than the guy next to you who’s just as skilled,” he added.
Amodei said that such massive salary changes could “destroy” a company’s culture by treating people “unfairly.”
Many of his employees have rejected the outside offers, and some “wouldn’t even talk to Mark Zuckerberg,” he said.
“This was a unifying moment for the company where we didn’t give in,” Amodei said. “We refuse to compromise our principles because we have the confidence that people are at Anthropic because they truly believe in the mission.”
“What they are doing is trying to buy something that cannot be bought,” he added.
Mark Zuckerberg highlighted some of Meta’s new hires on Wednesday’s earnings call.
“We’re building an elite, talent-dense team,” Zuckerberg said. “I’ve spent a lot of time building this team this quarter.”
Meta and Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Bidding war for top AI talent
Amodei’s comments come as Big Tech companies are paying top dollar to recruit elite AI talent, a trend that’s likened to sports franchises competing for superstar athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo.
The competition reached another level when Meta recruited Scale’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, last month as part of a $14.3 billion deal to take a 49% stake in his company. Then, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said Meta had tried to poach his best employees with $100 million signing bonuses.
Just weeks ago, Google paid $2.4 billion to hire the CEO and top talent of AI startup Windsurf and license its intellectual property. OpenAI had planned to buy Windsurf for $3 billion, but the deal fell apart.
“It’s not a hard choice” for the team at Anthropic because “people here are so mission-oriented,” the startup’s cofounder, Benjamin Mann, said on a recent episode of “Lenny’s Podcast.”
Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, said on a recent episode of the podcast “Decoder” that Big Tech companies need to ensure that employees are motivated by mission as well as money.
“You’re encountering new kinds of challenges. You feel a lot of growth, you’re learning new things. And you’re getting richer, too, along the way. Why would you want to go just because you have some guaranteed payments?” he said.
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