Tuesday 26 May 2026 10:49 am
Anthropic’s London expansion alone includes 12 openings
London’s AI hiring race is accelerating at dizzying rates, with Anthropic offering some engineers in the capital as much as £630,000 a year as Big Tech firms battle for AI talent.The US AI giant, backed by Amazon and best known for its chatbot Claude, is currently hiring for over 40 London roles as it expands into a new office with capacity for up to 800 employees.Among the openings are six research engineering roles, with advertised salaries reaching £630,000 before stock options.London has quickly become one of the world’s most competitive AI labour markets, as Anthropic, OpenAI and Google Deepmind aggressively scale their UK operations around King’s Cross, the capital’s so-called ‘knowledge quarter’ and answer to Silicon Valley.OpenAI is also rapidly expanding in London, with 32 vacancies currently advertised in the city out of nearly 700 globally.Several software engineering and infrastructure roles offer compensation packages nearing £450,000 a year, alongside equity.Google Deepmind, long Britain’s dominant AI employer, meanwhile continues hiring across frontier AI research, operations, safety and communications.The result is a hiring environment increasingly resembling finance or professional sport, where a relatively tiny pool of machine learning researchers command extraordinary salaries.Compensation for top AI engineers is now rapidly converging with Silicon Valley levels as US companies increasingly treat London as their preferred European AI base, overtaking Dublin and other rival tech hubs.Anthropic’s London expansion alone includes 12 openings across AI research and engineering, seven sales roles, six infrastructure jobs, four safeguards positions and vacancies across legal, marketing and applied AI.Some of the highest-paying positions are focused on building and training large language models – the systems underpinning generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude.There are relatively few engineers globally with experience scaling those models, particularly in reinforcement learning and advanced infrastructure systems, which helps explain the extraordinary compensation packages now emerging across the sector.AI talent race heats up amid job displacementThis surge in hiring comes amid growing concerns over the impact of AI on the jobs market.Anthropic co-founder Christoph Olah appeared alongside Pope Leo XIV on Tuesday, where he warned there was “a real possibility” AI could displace human labour “at very large scale”.Just last week, Standard Chartered announced plans to slash almost 8,000 back-office roles, as its chief executive Bill Winters pushed through a new strategy aimed at lifting profitability and increasing income per employee.Winters insisted, and not without controversy, the move was not a conventional cost-cutting exercise: “It’s not cost cutting: it’s replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and investment capital we’re putting in.”The job cuts look part of a gloomy trend hitting the banking sector. Research by Morgan Stanley last year estimated that AI would put more than 200,000 European banking jobs at risk by 2030, about 10 per cent of industry roles across the continent.For AI-related roles however, routine coding tasks are becoming increasingly automated, while the small number of engineers capable of designing, training and scaling frontier AI systems are becoming dramatically more valuable.A Deliveroo software engineer recently told City AM they had “barely coded manually for almost a year”. Instead, engineers are increasingly supervising AI systems capable of generating code autonomously.AI surge, talent squeezeAs a result, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Google are all now competing globally for what many insiders believe is still only a few hundred researchers capable of building advanced AI systems at scale.But the battle for talent is also spreading beyond engineering, with Anthropic and OpenAI having both advertised unusually high-paying communications, policy and enterprise sales roles in recent months, as AI firms attempt to manage rising scrutiny from governments and regulators.Some enterprise AI sales roles at Anthropic’s London office are understood to approach £200,000 in expected annual compensation.London remains Europe’s leading AI hub, attracting billions in investment and drawing frontier labs from the US into the city. But founders increasingly complain that competing with Big Tech salaries is becoming close to impossible.Several venture-backed AI businesses have already shifted towards hiring outside London or recruiting candidates from adjacent disciplines like physics and mathematics before training them internally. Others are attempting to compete on flexibility, equity and lifestyle rather than pay alone.
