Records have revealed the eyewatering salaries that OpenAI’s UK staff are paid and I promise you, it’s going to have you rushing off to polish up your CV.
It’s no secret that AI is big business these days, with Anthropic, the company behind Claude, valued at a whopping $965 billion back in May (£728bn), and OpenAI seeking a $1.4 trillion (around £1tn) valuation just last month.
With such massive numbers, it probably comes as little surprise that the team working at such companies are impressively compensated.
And now accounts have been revealed that show just how generously staff are paid.
Last year’s acounts for OpenAI UK Ltd, which is based in Westminster, showed that there were 110 staff members who split £87m in salaries and £168m in shares in the company.
Doing a quick bit of maths, that means the average salary was £2,318,181 last year.
See? I told you, you’d want to go and sort your CV out.
OpenAI offers very generous salaries (Heather Diehl/Getty Images)
For a bit of context, the Office of National Statistics found that the median annual earnings for full-time employees in the UK was £39,039.
So using this average salary, you’d need to work 58 years to match the average salary of a UK-based OpenAI worker.
However, according to the Guardian, there’s reportedly a large discrepancy between the AI company’s lowest and highest earners.
The largest pay packets are dished out to researchers who help to build OpenAI’s models, including Astra.
It’s also important to note that the figures are from 2025 when there was a bit of a talent war amongst AI companies to land themselves the best and brightest staff.
Other companies in the space, such as Meta, were reportedly offering multi-year salary packages that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.
When approached by the Guardian, OpenAI declined to comment on its salaries.
Meanwhile, last month, it was revealed that OpenAI was offering up very generous compensation packages as it builds out its robotics efforts.
The company had more than two dozen robotics jobs listed on its careers page in September, across various areas, including software, hardware and data collection.
It isn’t the only tech giant spending big on hiring talent ( Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
And these new roles came with some top-notch salaries, with publicly available information showing that the base wages ran from a way-above-average $177,000 (£133,600) to a frankly-staggering $500,000 (£377,400) a year, before equity.
The roles on offer included a lab tech tasked with helping to ‘develop, build, test, and iterate on robotic systems’ and actuator design engineers who are responsible for building the various parts of bots that help them move.
The highest-paid listing, as reported by Business Insider, was for a role for a ‘machine learning engineer’ who would be working on distributed data systems, infrastructure for processing, and moving huge amounts of robotics training data across computers.
Now, while that might all sound like an awful lot to get your head around, it does come with a salary of a half a million dollars per year.
Anyone else wishing they’d paid more attention in their IT classes?
