AI talent war: Amid reports of Meta’s $200 million offer, what is Zuckerberg trying to ‘buy but can’t’, according to Anthropic’s CEO?

Amid reports of aggressive hiring efforts by Meta, the CEO of AI startup Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has made a strong statement, one that seems aimed at Mark Zuckerberg’s poaching style.

Speaking on the Big Technology Podcast, Amodei shared that Anthropic has chosen not to match the high-paying offers being floated around by tech giants like Meta. He said that he told his team via Slack that the company would stay true to its values, even when competitors offer tempting packages.

Media reports have claimed that Meta has been actively targeting talent from Apple, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic for its new AI projects. In one case, the company is believed to have offered over $200 million to an Apple AI researcher.


But Amodei sees things differently. He referred to the recent poaching attempts as a “unifying moment” for his company and said it would be unfair to raise one person’s salary tenfold just because they caught Meta’s attention.

“If Mark Zuckerberg throws a dart at a dartboard and it hits your name, that doesn't mean you should be paid ten times more than the person next to you who's equally skilled,” he said during the interview.

While Meta did manage to hire Joel Pobar, a software engineer from Anthropic, Amodei said that many of his employees refused to even speak with the Meta CEO. He suggested that Meta’s hiring tactics don’t align with the kind of mission-driven culture Anthropic is trying to build.

He even went a step further, saying Zuckerberg was trying to “buy something that can’t be bought”, pointing towards the startup’s values and long-term vision.

Zuckerberg, for his part, has explained that his mission is to make superintelligence available to everyone and not just use AI to replace human jobs. His new AI lab is believed to be at the centre of this ambitious plan.

As the AI talent war heats up, companies are choosing different paths, some through massive paycheques, others through principled stands. Whether values or money will win this race is something only time will tell.

Inputs from agencies