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The Biggest AI Hires of 2025

Meta's $14.3 billion Scale AI deal, OpenAI's C-suite rebuild, and Google's Windsurf license turned 2024 and 2025 into a two-year auction for AI's rarest asset: the researchers themselves.

Edited by Ryan Elliott DennisUpdated 9 min read · 1,983 words · 25 sources
Bidders raising phones at a crowded auction
Bidders raising phones at a crowded auction. Photo · Pexels
“Two license deals worth $2.4 billion and $2.7 billion bought Google an army of researchers it once let walk away, and Meta topped the entire market with a single afternoon's paperwork worth $14.3 billion. Did a single afternoon's paperwork actually settle the AI talent war?”

A three-year-old startup outbid whole national science budgets for one afternoon's paperwork in the summer of 202512. The receipt read $14.3 billion. That was the moment the AI talent war stopped working like recruiting. It started working like arms buying. Between January 2024 and December 2025, five companies rewrote their leadership. Three billion-dollar labs split apart and re-formed. A handful of researchers moved more market value with one signature than most deals ever will.

Alexandr Wang, Fidji Simo and Ilya Sutskever anchor the list, and each used a different tool. Equity. Product command. Founder independence. This piece lists the moves that mattered, ranks the twenty biggest by weight, and sets up the sequel: what 2026 has already done to the same list.

The Raid

Meta's summer of 2025 supplied the defining deal. It paid $14.3 billion for 49% of Scale AI and made the startup's 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, its first chief AI officer12. Meta Superintelligence Labs launched under a Zuckerberg memo dated June 303. The company said the plan out loud. "Meta has finalized our strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI. As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts."

Jason Droege, Scale's chief strategy officer, took the interim chief executive seat Wang left1. Daniel Gross, who had run Safe Superintelligence, joined Wang at Meta in early July, after Meta's attempt to buy SSI outright fell through4. Ilya Sutskever took the SSI top job the same week. Nat Friedman, named beside Wang among Time's most influential AI figures that year, filled out the founding leadership3.

Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT, left OpenAI to become the lab's chief scientist6. Inc. read the hire as Meta taking its rival's newest research name. Ruoming Pang, who ran Apple's model group, followed7. Bloomberg and Entrepreneur separately put his package above $200 million8. Ke Yang, an Apple search executive, made the same jump9. By August, TheNextWeb reported Meta had taken five founding engineers from Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab10. Rivals rewrote their retention plans around it.

Reported nine-figure offers to other OpenAI researchers, some cited near $100 million, turned hiring into a story about pay as much as skill8. Read the pattern as strategy. Meta chose people who had shipped working research over people with degrees. That taste for builders shaped every counteroffer after. The offers also reset engineering pay far past the few labs that could match them.

The Rebuild

OpenAI took the sharpest exits and answered with hires of its own. September 2024 delivered the shock. Chief technology officer Mira Murati left with two senior research executives on one day15. CNN and Fortune both read the walkout as a turning point for the company's culture. Fast Company went further, calling the exits evidence of a wider brain drain23.

Sutskever had already left in May to found Safe Superintelligence5. John Schulman, an OpenAI co-founder, left for Anthropic that August, then moved to Murati's Thinking Machines Lab by February 202516. Two hops in ten months traced the field's pull better than any chart.

Sam Altman's answer came before the September exodus. In June 2024, OpenAI brought in Sarah Friar as chief financial officer and Kevin Weil as chief product officer1314. That pairing put consumer product instincts next to finance built for a public balance sheet. Mark Chen rose to chief research officer in the same reshuffle, steadying research after Murati left.

OpenAI finished the rebuild in May 2025 with Fidji Simo11. Instacart's chief executive and a former Meta product leader, she joined as OpenAI's first chief executive of Applications, reporting to Altman12. Chris Lehane, a veteran of Airbnb's policy shop, joined the same era to run outside regulatory work. Read that hire as preparation for the antitrust and export fights covered elsewhere on this site. Put together, a company lost its research founders and replaced them with operators fluent in consumer products, finance and Washington. A different team than Altman started 2024 with, and one built for scale.

The Retention Race

Google and Microsoft answered the raids with license-and-hire deals built to skip a formal purchase. Google's $2.4 billion license for Windsurf's coding-agent technology brought chief executive Varun Mohan and co-founder Douglas Chen into DeepMind17. Windsurf stayed a separate company. A year earlier Google ran the same play on Character.AI18. It paid a reported $2.7 billion for the technology, and re-hired founder Noam Shazeer, a Transformer co-inventor who had left in 2021. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's longtime research chief, took both hires into a wider architecture role.

Meta's $14.3 billion Scale AI deal dwarfs Google's $2.7 billion and $2.4 billion license-and-hire deals

Price of three AI talent deals, August 2024 to July 2025, in billions of dollars

Each bar is one deal's price: the magenta bar is Meta's stake in Scale AI, and the two blue bars are the license deals Google used to bring founders back in.

Sources: TechCrunch [1]; CNBC [2]; CNBC [17]; CNBC [18]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.

The numbers behind this chart
ItemValueNote
Meta, 49% of Scale AI$14.3BAnnounced June 13, 2025; Alexandr Wang became Meta's first chief AI officer
Google, Character.AI license$2.7BA reported price, August 2024; Noam Shazeer came back to Google
Google, Windsurf license$2.4BJuly 2025; Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen joined DeepMind

Microsoft moved first, in March 2024, bringing Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind's co-founder and Inflection AI's chief executive, into a new unit to run Copilot19. Satya Nadella explained the urgency in his own memo. "We are in Year 2 of the AI platform shift and must ensure we have the capability and capacity to boldly innovate." He put the stakes in blunter terms a line later. "There is no franchise value in our industry and the work and product innovation we drive at this moment will define the next decade and beyond." UK regulators later declined to open a full probe into the hiring pattern20. Jay Parikh joined Microsoft's leadership the next year to steady its wider AI engineering work.

Anthropic ran a quieter defense. It hired Krishna Rao as its first chief financial officer, to bring order to a balance sheet growing fast21. Anthropic also took John Schulman for a brief stint in 2024, before his move to Thinking Machines Lab16. Jan Leike, who had co-led OpenAI's alignment research before quitting in 2024, joined Anthropic's safety team the same year22. His resignation letter had said why. "Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products," Leike wrote, adding that he had "gradually lost trust" in OpenAI's leadership.

Each one picked a different defense. Google licensed its way around antitrust risk. Microsoft folded a whole startup into one division. Anthropic hired one executive at a time: slower, thinner on famous names, steadier on fit. That steadiness cost something. A company growing toward Anthropic's revenue eventually needs the product and hardware depth its rivals bought in bulk.

The Splinter Labs

Some of the era's biggest names started labs of their own. Sutskever founded Safe Superintelligence on June 19, 2024, with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher5. It raised $1 billion by September and reached a $30 billion valuation by March 2025. Then Gross left for Meta, and Sutskever took the top job himself.

Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab after her OpenAI exit, drawing Schulman and others, before Meta's raid took five founding engineers back out1016. Apple took the costliest loss of the period79. Pang's and Yang's moves left the foundation-models group visibly thinner, which Bloomberg read as Apple becoming a training ground for rival labs.

Amazon answered with its own acquihire, bringing Adept AI's David Luan into its general intelligence effort with much of his team. xAI spent the same period absorbing turnover among its founding researchers, while Elon Musk folded the company into X in an all-stock deal. That merger changed who controlled the social data feeding Grok's training, and handed the lab a consumer channel its peers had to build or buy.

Every one of these moves shares a logic. A founder-scientist with enough standing could raise money and pull a team, which shrinks the distance between a research lab and a startup pitch to weeks.

Adam Khoo, an independent tech investor, revisited Meta's price tag for Wang in a September 2026 post on X. "Fast-forward to today: Meta's new AI products developed under Wang's leadership have added roughly $200 billion in market value. Suddenly, paying billions to secure world-class talent doesn't look quite so crazy," Khoo wrote24.

Dario Amodei, Anthropic's chief executive, answered the same bidding in early August 2025, days after reports that Zuckerberg's team had dangled $100 million packages at his own researchers. He dismissed the logic behind the number. "I think that what they are doing is trying to buy something that cannot be bought, and that is alignment with the mission," Amodei told Fortune25.

The Twenty That Mattered

Ranked by weight, apart from the calendar, the twenty moves below reshaped who controls frontier research going into 2026.

  1. Alexandr Wang turned Scale AI's data work into a $14.3 billion Meta stake and the first chief AI officer title12.
  2. Daniel Gross carried product judgment from Safe Superintelligence into Meta's new lab leadership4.
  3. Shengjia Zhao gave Meta a direct line to ChatGPT's own design, as its chief scientist6.
  4. Ruoming Pang's $200 million-plus package emptied Apple's model group in one signature78.
  5. Fidji Simo brought OpenAI a proven operator at consumer scale, with Meta and Instacart behind her1112.
  6. Varun Mohan handed Google a coding-agent team through a $2.4 billion license, picked over a purchase17.
  7. Mustafa Suleyman gave Microsoft a DeepMind co-founder to run its whole consumer AI plan19.
  8. Ilya Sutskever pulled OpenAI's founding safety ideas out of the company and rebuilt them at Safe Superintelligence5.
  9. Mira Murati took OpenAI's product and engineering habits and built Thinking Machines Lab around them16.
  10. Noam Shazeer came back to Google as the Transformer co-inventor it let walk away in 202118.
  11. Sarah Friar gave OpenAI public-company money discipline ahead of its next rounds1314.
  12. Kevin Weil paired Twitter and Instagram product experience with OpenAI's consumer aims13.
  13. John Schulman hopped twice, OpenAI to Anthropic to Thinking Machines Lab, tracing the field's pull in one career16.
  14. Jan Leike moved OpenAI's alignment work straight into Anthropic's safety team22.
  15. Krishna Rao became Anthropic's first CFO as the company grew toward a public balance sheet21.
  16. Douglas Chen added to Google's coding-agent staff beside Mohan in the Windsurf deal17.
  17. Jason Droege kept Scale AI steady as interim chief the moment Meta's deal pulled Wang away1.
  18. Daniel Levy co-founded Safe Superintelligence with Sutskever and Gross, trading OpenAI research for a founder's stake5.
  19. Ke Yang pushed Meta's Apple raid past foundation models and into the search team9.
  20. OpenAI's September 2024 exodus, Murati plus two research executives, forced the fastest rebuild of the period15.

By the numbers

  • Meta paid $14.3 billion for 49% of Scale AI, announced June 13, 20251.
  • Scale AI's implied value reached $29 billion once the deal closed1.
  • Google licensed Windsurf's coding tools and hired its leaders for $2.4 billion in July 202517.
  • Google's Character.AI license carried a reported $2.7 billion price in August 202418.
  • Apple's Ruoming Pang reportedly got a package above $200 million to join Meta78.
  • Safe Superintelligence raised $1 billion in September 2024, then hit $30 billion seven months later5.
  • Alexandr Wang was twenty-eight when Meta named him chief AI officer2.
  • Two career hops, OpenAI to Anthropic to Thinking Machines Lab, took John Schulman ten months16.

What to watch

The same roster kept moving through 2026. A companion piece, The Biggest AI Hires of 2026 (So Far)," tracks where Meta Superintelligence Labs, OpenAI's applications division and the founder-scientist labs tracks where Meta Superintelligence Labs, OpenAI's applications arm and the founder-scientist labs stand today. Watch Scale AI's board for how long Jason Droege's interim tag lasts1. Safe Superintelligence's fundraising calendar will show whether Sutskever's solo leadership holds the value Gross helped build5. Apple's foundation-models group is the clearest test of whether a thinned team can hire its way back79. Anthropic's next senior hire will show whether its quieter style keeps pace with rivals writing nine-figure checks in one sitting21.

Sources

  1. TechCrunch Staff, "Scale AI confirms 'significant' investment from Meta, says CEO Alexandr Wang is leaving," TechCrunch, June 13, 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/13/scale-ai-confirms-significant-investment-from-meta-says-ceo-alexandr-wang-is-leaving/
  2. CNBC Staff, "Scale AI's Alexandr Wang confirms departure for Meta as part of $14.3 billion deal," CNBC, June 12, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/12/scale-ai-founder-wang-announces-exit-for-meta-part-of-14-billion-deal.html
  3. CNBC Staff, "Mark Zuckerberg announces creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Read the memo," CNBC, June 30, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/30/mark-zuckerberg-creating-meta-superintelligence-labs-read-the-memo.html
  4. CNBC Staff, "Ilya Sutskever becomes CEO of Safe Superintelligence after Meta poached Daniel Gross," CNBC, July 3, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/03/ilya-sutskever-is-ceo-of-safe-superintelligence-after-meta-hired-gross.html
  5. Wikipedia contributors, "Safe Superintelligence," Wikipedia, accessed 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Superintelligence_Inc.
  6. Ben Sherry, "Meta Poached Its New Chief Scientist for Superintelligence From OpenAI," Inc., June 30, 2025, https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/meta-poached-its-new-chief-scientist-for-superintelligence-from-openai/91219795
  7. Bloomberg Staff, "Apple Loses Top AI Models Executive to Meta's Hiring Spree," Bloomberg, July 7, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-07/apple-loses-its-top-ai-models-executive-to-meta-s-hiring-spree
  8. Entrepreneur Staff, "Meta Is Reportedly Paying an Apple Engineer Over $200 Million to Join Its Superintelligence Effort," Entrepreneur, July 8, 2025, https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/meta-offers-former-apple-manager-hundreds-of-millions-in-pay/494485
  9. PYMNTS Staff, "Apple AI Crises Deepen as Search Exec Ke Yang Moves to Meta," PYMNTS, July 9, 2025, https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2025/apple-ai-crises-deepen-search-exec-ke-yang-moves-meta/
  10. TheNextWeb Staff, "Meta has hired five founding members of Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab in a systematic talent raid," TheNextWeb, August 2025, https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-thinking-machines-lab-talent-raid
  11. CNBC Staff, "OpenAI hires Instacart CEO Fidji Simo as head of applications, reporting to Altman," CNBC, May 7, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/07/openai-hires-instacart-ceo-fidgi-simo-as-head-of-applications.html
  12. Bloomberg Staff, "OpenAI Recruits Instacart CEO Fidji Simo to Steer Operations," Bloomberg, May 8, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-08/openai-recruits-instacart-ceo-fidji-simo-to-lead-app-development
  13. OpenAI, "OpenAI welcomes Sarah Friar (CFO) and Kevin Weil (CPO)," OpenAI, June 10, 2024, https://openai.com/index/openai-welcomes-cfo-cpo/
  14. Axios Staff, "OpenAI hires Sarah Friar as CFO, Kevin Weil as Chief Product Officer," Axios, June 10, 2024, https://www.axios.com/2024/06/10/open-ai-sarah-friar-kevin-weil-hired
  15. CNN Staff, "Mira Murati, OpenAI's technology chief, becomes the latest exec to leave the company," CNN, September 25, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/25/tech/openai-technology-chief-mira-murati-leaving
  16. Fortune Staff, "OpenAI cofounder John Schulman is joining Mira Murati's startup after brief stint at Anthropic," Fortune, February 6, 2025, https://fortune.com/2025/02/06/openai-john-schulman-mira-muratis-startup-anthropic
  17. CNBC Staff, "Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in $2.4 billion AI talent deal," CNBC, July 11, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/11/google-windsurf-ceo-varun-mohan-latest-ai-talent-deal-.html
  18. CNBC Staff, "Ex-Google engineers who founded Character.AI rejoin company with AI partnership," CNBC, August 2, 2024, https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/02/ex-google-engineers-from-characterai-re-join-company-with-ai-partnership-.html
  19. Microsoft, "Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection Co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot," Official Microsoft Blog, March 19, 2024, https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/03/19/mustafa-suleyman-deepmind-and-inflection-co-founder-joins-microsoft-to-lead-copilot/
  20. CNBC Staff, "Microsoft dodges in-depth UK probe into hiring of staff from AI firm Inflection," CNBC, September 4, 2024, https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/04/microsoft-avoids-uk-probe-into-hiring-of-inflection-ai-employees.html
  21. Anthropic, "Krishna Rao joins Anthropic as Chief Financial Officer," Anthropic, 2025, https://www.anthropic.com/news/krishna-rao-joins-anthropic
  22. Wikipedia contributors, "Jan Leike," Wikipedia, accessed September 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Leike
  23. Fast Company Staff, "OpenAI brain drain: What to make of CTO Mira Murati's sudden exit," Fast Company, September 26, 2024, https://www.fastcompany.com/91197772/openai-brain-drain-what-to-make-of-cto-mira-muratis-sudden-exit
  24. Brian Sozzi, "Meta's $14 billion AI bet looks like it's finally paying off," Yahoo Finance, September 24, 2026, https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/metas-14-billion-ai-bet-looks-like-its-finally-paying-off-155139007.html
  25. Emma Burleigh, "Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says his employees are refusing Zuckerberg's $100 million payout—and he's not even matching salaries to keep them," Fortune, August 4, 2025, https://fortune.com/2025/08/04/billionaire-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-ai-staffers-poaching-meta-mark-zuckerberg-100k-six-figure-salaries-openai-sam-altman/

In the market

MetaMETA

Market value $1.57 trillion

$614.99 −1.53% since the last close

MicrosoftMSFT

Market value $3.88 trillion

$521.91 −1.55% since the last close

Prices from Yahoo Finance, read with yfinance, and delayed. This is a record of price, not investment advice.

Cite this piece

Ryan Elliott Dennis, "The Biggest AI Hires of 2025," AI Lately, Aug 1, 2025, https://ailately.com/articles/biggest-ai-hires-of-2025

Tags: Meta · OpenAI · Google DeepMind · Microsoft · Anthropic · Scale AI · compensation · talent war

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