Akash Samant has long believed he should pay for most expenses in a relationship, whether it is rent or date nights or vacations abroad. He grew up in Arizona, and his parents raised him to take pride in being able to provide for others. Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence boom has helped him do just that.
Mr. Samant, 26, met his long-distance girlfriend, Valeria Barojas, 24, on a dating app in September 2024 after he co-founded Coverflow, an A.I. start-up that serves insurance agencies. The start-up raised $4.8 million in venture capital funding last year. (Mr. Samant declined to disclose the company’s valuation.) He lives in San Francisco, and Ms. Barojas is in Glendale, Ariz., where she is completing her undergraduate degree in social work at Arizona State University and living off her savings.
When the couple visit each other, Mr. Samant pays for their flights. When they traveled together to Paris last year, he paid for the hotel and dinners. The pair hope to move in together in the near future, and plan to split housing costs proportional to their incomes.
“It is not an expectation that I have to pay for everything for her,” Mr. Samant said. “Ultimately, I’d like to do that, but that’s not something that I do currently.”
Mr. Samant’s company has provided him a compensation package that exceeds anything he previously made in his career as an engineer. He earns $120,000 to $160,000 in base salary and has a substantial equity stake as a co-founder. His dream scenario? Making enough money from his company’s going public or being acquired to give Ms. Barojas the choice to opt out of working. But not without a prenup, a topic that came up last month after he and Ms. Barojas had been dating for about a year and half.
“Everyone’s effort is always going to look different to someone else’s,” Ms. Barojas said, regarding splitting expenses in a relationship. “My 100 percent can be someone’s 60 percent, and vice versa.”
The A.I. frenzy is creating personal fortunes rarely seen in modern technology, changing people’s attitudes about fairness and money in relationships. Nearly 25 percent of people said higher compensation amid the A.I. boom had changed the way they split expenses with a partner, according to a survey of more than 1,000 people conducted last month by Blind, a forum where people can anonymously discuss work. About 9 percent of respondents said the A.I. boom had made them think differently about prenuptial agreements or financial protections.
Technology companies are paying A.I. employees premium salaries, with some researchers negotiating $250 million pay packages. Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are raising billions of dollars to keep up with investments in A.I. start-ups. OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX, which recently merged with xAI, have taken steps toward initial public offerings. Those public listings alone could mint more than 16,000 millionaires, according to an estimate compiled by Sacra, which provides research on private markets.
For people working in tech, a prenup is often expected, said Lauren Lavender, chief marketing officer at HelloPrenup, a start-up that allows couples to create prenuptial agreements. It can be more surprising when a couple doesn’t get one, she added. Some tech workers who use HelloPrenup have equity compensation packages that are worth more than their base salaries.
“People in the Bay Area — because they work in an industry that could potentially be overtaken by A.I. — they’re fully aware of the assets that they have,” she said. “They have a lifestyle that they want to protect.”
“I definitely rely on her for emotional support,” Mr. Samant said. But since he started his company before he met Ms. Barojas, he said, he considers its financial success separate from their relationship.
Since Gujri Singh, 31, joined OpenAI at the end of 2023 as a member of its sales team, she said, signing a prenuptial agreement with a future partner before marriage is nonnegotiable.
“I know how hard it has been for women to be financially independent and be in situations where they’re not in control,” she said. “To me, that has always been the scariest thing.”
Ms. Singh, who is single, said a former boyfriend became more understanding about her desire for a prenup after she was hired by OpenAI, where, she said, she earns between $200,000 and $300,000 annually, in addition to equity in the privately held company.
“I think what I have today will not be the totality of what I earn in my career,” she said. “I’m, quite frankly, just getting started.”
OpenAI is paying employees more than any other major tech start-up in history, The Wall Street Journal reported in December, with the company’s stock-based compensation alone reaching an average of $1.5 million per employee in 2025. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, over copyright infringement of news content. Both companies have denied wrongdoing.)
Highly paid employees are making relationship and money decisions amid uncertainty about whether their equity will crash or soar, whether their company will go public or be acquired and whether the A.I. bubble will burst. This uncertainty is a big reason technology employees gravitate toward prenups, said Sam Mockford, an associate wealth adviser at Citrine Capital based in San Francisco.
“A prenup is thinking about the near future and the far future and the what-if future,” she said. “And when you’re looking at equity, there’s a lot that’s variable about your future wealth.”
Even among couples where both partners are in high-paying fields, such as consulting and technology, the A.I. gold rush has widened pay gaps.
Megan Lieu, 29, founder of ML Data, a company that creates content about A.I. and technology, said her earnings had soared since 2022, the year of ChatGPT’s release. She has since teamed up with Anthropic, Nvidia, Salesforce and Adobe, all companies that have financially benefited from artificial intelligence.
Ms. Lieu’s company made more than $660,000 last year, with brand deals being the main source of revenue, she said. She earns about five times as much as her boyfriend, Daniel Kim, 32, who works in management consulting, and they live together in the Washington, D.C., area in a property she owns. Though Mr. Kim pays Ms. Lieu about an equal share in mortgage costs each month, she covers a bigger portion of other housing expenses — such as homeowners association fees and utilities.
“Being in the world of content creation around A.I. has exposed me to a lot of other women and families and people who have this kind of nontraditional household — where sometimes it is the woman contributing more,” Ms. Lieu said. She said that she viewed Mr. Kim as her equal, and that income disparity had not created tension in their relationship.
“I would never view my partner as a competitor, but I would say that I am pretty competitive normally relative to peers,” she said.
Mr. Kim said he preferred to cover everyday expenses, including picking up the check during date nights and paying for the couple’s grocery bills.
“It’s just a kind gesture that I think I’m providing for my girlfriend, and I enjoy providing that kind of gesture,” he said. “It’s the same with my family, same with my dogs, like I just enjoy providing a kind gesture for them when I can.”
Ms. Lieu and Mr. Kim have informally discussed what a prenup might look like. If one person’s investment blows up, he doesn’t necessarily view it as individual, saying the other partner contributed indirectly, whether through support and sacrifices.
“When you agree to get married,” he said, “you’re kind of agreeing to become one.”
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