Mind Games: Talent wars heat up as AI startups take on Big Tech

Competition among tech giants such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft, and artificial intelligence (AI) startups like OpenAI and Anthropic has now heightened, not only with respect to products and models, but also the people building them.

The intensity of these talent wars was underscored earlier this week when Alphabet's Google DeepMind lost prominent researchers to rival OpenAI and Anthropic. The exits contributed to a sharp selloff in Alphabet shares, which lost roughly $270 billion in market value on the NASDAQ, according to a Times of India (TOI) report.

Here are some of the more notable AI talent moves in recent months that highlight the industry's escalating battle for top researchers and engineers.


Noam Shazeer and John Jumper exit Google DeepMind

Noam Shazeer, Google's vice president of engineering and co-lead of its Gemini models, announced his departure from the company to join OpenAI on June 20, less than two years after Google spent about $2.7 billion to bring him back along with his team, after he’d left to found Character.AI.

Shazeer, who joined Google in 2000, had co-authored the influential 2017 ‘Attention Is All You Need’ research paper, which played a key role in the development of the company's AI assistant, Gemini.

The move came just three days after Nobel Laureate John Jumper left Google’s AI lab for Anthropic.

Per Bloomberg, AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are also expected to leave the company for Anthropic. These exits add to growing concerns over Google's ability to retain top AI talent.

Dean Ball and Peter Steinberger move to OpenAI

OpenAI has stepped up its hiring efforts in recent months, adding several prominent figures across AI to its research, policy, and product development teams.

Apart from Shazeer, the Sam Altman-led firm also hired Dean Ball, who helped shape early AI policy discussions in US president Donald Trump’s administration. He will lead its new Strategic Futures team focused on frontier AI policy.

Earlier in February, the startup brought in Peter Steinberger, creator of the open-source AI agent framework OpenClaw, to help develop its next generation of agents. Steinberger had revealed that he chose OpenAI over a higher offer from Meta, citing stronger alignment with the former’s product vision and its goal of building broadly accessible AI systems.

Per online AI talent tracker Trueup.io, OpenAI has seen 17 arrivals since the beginning of this year compared to 12 departures.

Andrej Karpathy and Eric Boyd join Anthropic

Like OpenAI, Anthropic too has strengthened its ranks with several high-profile hires.

The company recruited OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI chief Andrej Karpathy in May this year. Karpathy joined its pre-training division to build a team focussed on using Claude to accelerate future model research and development.

Anthropic has also hired Eric Boyd, a longtime Microsoft executive who spent 16 years at the company leading its AI platform and overseeing large-scale model deployments. Boyd is heading the startup's infrastructure division.

The startup's rising appeal is reflected in venture capital firm SignalFire's 2025 analysis, which found that Google DeepMind engineers were about 11 times more likely to move to Anthropic than Anthropic employees were to join Google, according to a TOI report. Per Trueup.io, the company has seen 9 top executive arrivals over 4 departures this year. Anthropic has also been among the best in retaining AI talent. Since 2024, the company has seen over 18 top executive arrivals compared to just 9 departures.

In an interview with Bloomberg, co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei said the startup remains unique among leading AI labs in retaining all of its co-founders, and highlighted its sustained focus on preserving Anthropic's mission and culture.