OpenAI and Anthropic are battling Big Tech for talent. We asked workers who's winning them over

Mike Kostersitz (left), Abhinav Bohra (center), and Sneja Shah (right) shared their dream employers and the companies they might pass on. Mike Kostersitz (left), Abhinav Bohra (center), and Sneja Shah (right)

Tech companies are competing fiercely for workers who can help them win the AI race.

We asked eight tech workers for their dream employers — and the companies they'd pass on.

Some favored OpenAI or Anthropic, while others preferred Big Tech.

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 says he'd choose Amazon, with NVIDIA as his runner-up. Abhinav Bohra

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.

Between Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA, which company would you most (or least) want to work for?

Amazon, which is boring, so here's the runner-up: NVIDIA. Recommendation at scale has become an inference cost problem. Running a big model once is cheap. Running it for every search and every shopper in real time is where the money goes. When your unit of progress is the millisecond, NVIDIA sits upstream of everything.

Each company could be a good fit for someone in my field, but I also imagine they all have teams I'd love and teams I'd dread.

I'd choose Anthropic for its values

Mike Kostersitz says Anthropic would be his dream employer outside Nike. Mike Kostersitz

Mike Kostersitz is a senior director, product management at Nike. He's in his early 60s and lives in Oregon.

If you could work for any tech company, what would it be?

If I had to look outside Nike, Anthropic would be my dream employer. The pull is real, and the company's stated values align more closely with my own than some other companies.

I took note when earlier this year, Anthropic refused a Pentagon push to strip out restrictions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons use, a stand their own CFO said could cost the company billions in revenue . That's the kind of "values over dollars" moment most companies only talk about.

I don't expect that to hold forever. Once they IPO , the pull toward shareholder value will grow, and I'd expect other priorities to erode over time as a result. But I'd still pick Anthropic as my top choice.

Between Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA, which company would you most (or least) want to work for?

Apple, hands down, I love the products and what the culture represents. Least would be Amazon. I have a number of friends who are current or former Amazon employees on the tech side, and not one of them has ever seemed excited to go to work there or felt like they were making a difference, beyond the paycheck being strong.

Business Insider is speaking with tech workers who've found themselves at a corporate crossroads — whether due to a layoff, resignation, job search, or shifting workplace expectations.

Share your story by filling out this form .

I haven't applied to OpenAI or Anthropic

Meta's scale is part of its appeal in the competition for AI talent. Imen Ben Youssef / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images

This tech worker is a software engineer at Meta.

If you could work for any tech company, what would it be?

Honestly, the answer might be where I already am: Meta. The frontier labs get the headlines, but hyperscalers like Meta and Google are doing the same caliber of work: not just core model training and fine-tuning but building the insane infrastructure needed to serve this to billions of users.

One reason I haven't tried to land a job at an AI lab like OpenAI or Anthropic is that the labs are running on investor capital , while the hyperscalers fund their AI push from core businesses that already make enormous money. They have different risk profiles, and I've been happy with mine.

Between Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA, which company would you most (or least) want to work for?

Most: Setting Meta aside, Google is the obvious choice for me. It's one of the few companies doing everything in-house, from TPUs to frontier models to products. That full stack under one roof is appealing.

Least: Probably Apple, and honestly that's about fit, not the company. They build incredible products and their engineering is world class, but their working model is very different from what I'm used to. Teams there tend to work on a focused slice under a lot of confidentiality, while my career so far has been end-to-end ownership, seeing a system from design through production and operations.

I'd choose SpaceX over any Big Tech company or AI lab

A tech lead (not pictured) in the insurance industry says SpaceX is his dream employer, Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

This tech worker is a tech lead at a company in the insurance industry. He's in h...

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