Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
For years, a job at Google was the ultimate status symbol in tech. Now, a new pair of employers is attracting the industry's most ambitious workers.OpenAI and Anthropic have become the hottest career destinations in Silicon Valley, drawing a flood of applicants eager to work at the epicenter of the AI boom. The workers are chasing prestige and the chance to help shape a technological revolution — plus to potentially cash in on the most anticipated IPOs in tech history.Across Reddit, Blind and X, job seekers are swapping interview tips and hiring rumors for both companies, hoping to break in. Several executives have ditched other employers to join the labs. Sundeep Teki, a career coach who helps place talent at AI companies, told Business Insider that nearly every candidate he speaks with has the same goal. On a form asking which companies they want to target, "nine times out of 10," he said, applicants list OpenAI or Anthropic."Anthropic is the No. 1 priority," Teki said. He added that with either name on a résumé, an employee has options: "No matter what you end up doing after you move on from Anthropic or OpenAI, you're bound to be successful."The companies' tech is reshaping the economy — and the workforce from which they hire. Codex and Claude Code have transformed the work of software engineers, helping usher in an era of AI-attributed layoffs at companies like Square and Cloudflare. Meanwhile, the two frontier AI labs have avoided job cuts, and offer lucrative compensation packages, abundant resources, and ambitious plans."There's almost an exclusivity in it for those who are working there," said Randy Ksar, a content marketer who applied to Anthropic for the same reason he once worked at Yahoo — it's a brand he respects. "You want to be part of something big."Both companies are growing fast as they compete for customers, reckon with their impact, and fight for technological supremacy. Anthropic, which has more than 3,500 employees, lists around 380 open roles. OpenAI has about 720 open jobs — the company is looking to almost double its 4,500-person workforce this year, The Financial Times reported in March.
