In Silicon Valley, AI companies are poaching talent from tech giants

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence talent wars are now playing out in Asia.

OpenAI and Anthropic are poaching top talent from US tech giants including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to build teams in countries like India and Singapore to sell their products and strengthen engagement with policymakers.

Last month, Meta’s India and Southeast Asia vice president, Sandhya Devanathan, left the company after a decade to join OpenAI as vice president for Southeast Asia and Australia. This was at least the ninth hire by a US AI giant from an American big tech firm in Asia in the past year.

“The number of executives in India who’ve actually run a country-level P&L [profit and loss] for a global tech company, negotiated with Indian regulators, and built enterprise trust at scale is small, maybe a few hundred people across all of Big Tech India,” Arjun Jaggi, an applied AI researcher and executive adviser to Fortune 500 companies, told Rest of World.

OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to requests for interviews...

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