OpenAI and Anthropic are battling Big Tech for talent. We asked workers who's winning them over — and who's not.

While tech companies are pouring billions into AI infrastructure, they are also competing fiercely for AI talent — and the AI boom is reshaping the choices available to workers.

Alongside established giants like Apple, Google, and Amazon, frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic now offer the chance to work at the edge of a technological shift, with potentially significant financial upside. Meanwhile, years of tech layoffs have made job security a bigger consideration for many workers.

We asked eight tech workers about their dream employer, the Big Tech companies they're most and least interested in, and whether they've pursued jobs at OpenAI or Anthropic. (Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.)

AI labs have come calling. I haven't pursued them.

Abhinav Bohra is a senior applied scientist at Amazon. He's in his 30s and lives in Seattle.

Have you tried to land a job at an AI lab like OpenAI or Anthropic?

A couple of recruiters for AI labs have reached out to me, including one at another Big Tech company. I took the calls but never pursued them.

Labs hire people to make models smarter. I build recommendation engines, and a frontier lab has no real use for one yet: no catalog, no sellers, no shoppers to rank for. The day one of them runs an actual marketplace, people like me get very interested in them. We're not there yet.