One of the world’s biggest AI companies, Anthropic, is advertising for machine learning research engineers in London, with salaries of up to £630,000 a year. Seeing this on the US company’s website certainly made me question my modern languages degree. 

Anthropic announced last week that it is moving to a new London office with space for 800 people, four times the number that it currently has in the British capital.

Similarly, its rival, OpenAI, is opening a permanent London space for over 500, more than double its current headcount, and has pledged to make London its largest research hub outside the United States. 

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These two will be based in King’s Cross (along with Google DeepMind) in what has become the city’s tech heartland, aka the Knowledge Quarter.

The salary range on offer for that particular Anthropic job spans a bamboozling £260,000 to £630,000 and includes a bonus but does not cover stock options — always a vital part of tech compensation. Wrapping those in, the total package would be worth a lot more.

This role is for someone who can build and train the brains of generative AI. Strong candidates, the job spec says, would have familiarity with the architecture of large language models and reinforcement learning (where an AI agent learns to make better decisions over time by receiving rewards or penalties in response to its actions).

There are not many people who can do this. And suddenly, everyone wants them. London, whose AI talent used to revolve around one dominant player, Google DeepMind, is becoming a very crowded battlefield. 

A £630,000 salary may be the tip of the iceberg as AI companies move into sports team level economics. Meta, OpenAI, Google and xAI are all reportedly shelling out millions for superstar AI talent. Google DeepMind is apparently offering some top researchers pay packages of up to $20 million a year. 

The expansion of leading AI businesses in London is a great accolade for the city, which remains Europe’s “undisputed AI capital”, with roughly 1,700 venture capital-backed AI start-ups worth about $125 billion based here and $7.1 billion raised in 2025, according to a March 2026 Prosus/Dealroom report.

It is a testament to the incredible tech expertise for which the UK is celebrated, and will attract even more as these two world-leading frontier AI labs bring scientists from around the world to Britain.

The flipside of this, is that competition for a small pool of elite talent across the board is intensifying. Tech start-up founders report that hiring is getting harder. To tempt new joiners, they have to offer more and more money, and it often means substantial dilution of a founder’s ownership to offer them shares.

“The salaries are brutal”, one start-up founder said, who complained that the US companies hoovered up all the best people: “I need to raise a funding round sooner just to hire one senior person. When you have to hire, and you know OpenAI is next door, you have to be prepared to offer an insane package.”

Government research into AI skills published in January shows inflated salaries risk putting skilled hires out of reach for small companies, and entrenching the advantage for the best-funded. Researchers also like to have the time and space to write academic papers, which does not necessarily advance the needs of the business and is a luxury that is hard for start-ups to offer.

London is now a three-way talent battleground as local start-ups vie with US companies expanding into Europe as well as the big AI labs hiring aggressively, according to Sandra Schwarzer, vice-president of talent at Index Ventures. The UK is now the default place for US companies entering Europe, she says, shifting away from Dublin. “Compensation is converging with the US for enterprise account executives and research talent.” So how do smaller companies compete and, crucially, keep great people?

One of the most imaginative moves comes from Jeremy Fraenkel, chief executive of Fundamental AI, who is basing his European team in Barcelona. His theory is that the city is a pretty delightful place to live, but with very little in the way of AI competition. 

Once they are settled, he hopes, people will stay for the Spanish lifestyle and there’s less danger that they will be poached by rivals. Fundamental AI has just emerged out of stealth mode with a $255 million Series A funding pot, so we have a few years yet before we find out if the tapas offensive has paid off. 

Another British AI business, Doubleword, is widening the net in a different way by employing people beyond typical AI recruits and training them up. 

“A lot of our best engineers did not study AI at university,” Meryem Arik, chief executive and co-founder, says. “There’s a big pipeline of people that come from hard sciences like physics who are really, really good at maths that become AI researchers. We look for this talent that we can convert.” The AI discipline is evolving so quickly, she explained, that the tactic of training on the job has worked well.

Synthesia, the AI video business, has announced plans to increase its global headcount by 70 per cent, investing more than $25 million in its new and current offices across the US and Europe this year. Yet the British AI unicorn says recruiting in the traditional way would hold back growth.

One of its recruitment tactics is offering flexibility, relaxing office attendance requirements for some roles, so that it can find people outside of London and even the UK altogether.

Of course, it is not all about money. A few lucky founders are capitalising on their start-up status to take on engineers straight out of university. The promise of autonomy and equity in an early-stage venture can prove compelling in the throes of the AI boom.

Hard as it is to hire, London has at least has one advantage over the AI hotspot of San Francisco: retention. People outside Silicon Valley remain more loyal to their employer, and do not jump to the next job every few months.

Yet there’s no doubt that this strange split economy in London is becoming more pronounced. Headline-grabbing salaries at the frontier labs, but a harsher environment for start-ups.