Leading AI labs are willing to pay astronomical sums to win the fierce war for talent. According to new data from Anthropic, some of its employees earn fixed base salaries that exceed $1 million. And that’s without taking into account bonuses or stock packages, which often double or triple the developers’ actual income.
Leading AI labs are willing to pay astronomical sums to win the fierce war for talent. According to new data from Anthropic, some of its employees earn fixed base salaries that exceed $1 million. And that’s without taking into account bonuses or stock packages, which often double or triple the developers’ actual income.
Details of the financial policy of the startup that created the popular Claude family of models became known thanks to an analysis of US federal documents on H-1B work visa sponsorship, conducted by Business Insider .
In a recent list of certified visa applications by Anthropic, two compensations stand out for their staggering size. Both positions, listed as «Member of Technical Staff,» are a common generic title for developers in Silicon Valley. One of these foreign-born professionals has a base annual salary of $1.12 million, while the other has a record $1.38 million.
This level of pay is due to an extreme shortage of qualified personnel. Competitors with large budgets, such as OpenAI, Meta, Google and Nvidia, are engaged in a daily struggle to attract and retain top engineers, writing off their exorbitant salaries as necessary expenses. Against this background, Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia only increased the number of applications for H-1B visas for foreign scientists in 2026, while other classic tech giants reduced their requests.
The reports do not detail the specific responsibilities of the recipients of the record salaries. Since the job title «technical staff member» is used extremely widely at the company, these could be both unique scientists researching the architecture of large language models and experienced top managers who were lured away from competitors.
Options are also an important factor in the battle for heads. As Anthropic’s market valuation soared to $965 billion in May of this year, the options of employees who joined the company even a year or two ago have turned into real millions. According to SignalFire analysts, it is thanks to the steady growth of capitalization that Anthropic demonstrates a better level of staff retention than most other labs and regularly wins duels for engineers, in particular by luring key personnel from Google.
Below are the ranges of actual base annual salaries at Anthropic for various positions in 2026, based on documents submitted to the government.
Technical specialists and researchers:
Technical Staff Member (Development/Research): $133,952 to $1,380,000.
Technical staff member (management positions): from $134,139 to $850,000.
Reinforcement Learning Researcher: $112,778 to $500,000.
Product line and operations:
Product Design Manager: $140,254 to $385,000.
Product Operations: from $125,000 to $500,000.
Research Operations: from $125,000 to $500,000.
Finance, marketing and other departments:
Partnerships: from $227,760 to $248,500.
Computing capacity optimization specialist: from $187,574 to $300,000.
Finance and Strategy: from $182,978 to $310,000.
Commercial lawyer: from $198,765 to $320,000.
Marketing: from $159,328 to $200,000.
Previously, the world’s leading IT research company, Gartner, predicted that by 2028, AI coding tools could cost more than the average developer’s salary. The reason is that companies will buy more licenses, and AI vendors will start charging for the amount of work performed and for the actual result.
