Some of Anthropic’s employees are raking in over $1 million in base salary, new data on the AI juggernaut shows.
Anthropic could go public as early as this fall. As it ramps up for what could be a $1 trillion IPO, the San Francisco company has also accelerated its hiring over the last year — and has kept its workers well paid.
Federal filings from the startup’s H-1B visa sponsorships provide a window into the hefty pay packages it offers employees. Two salaries in Anthropic’s recent H-1B crop stand out for their staggering size. Both of their roles are listed as Member of Technical Staff, a common catch-all at the AI labs — one garnered a $1.12 million base salary, the other $1.38 million.
The sheer size of the salaries Anthropic offers some of these workers comes from its blazing battle for talent. Deep-pocketed competitors like Meta, Google, and OpenAI have fought to win and retain top engineers, writing off exorbitant pay packages as necessary expenses.
Because Anthropic applies its Member of Technical Staff title so broadly, it’s impossible to know from the filings what exactly these workers do. They could be top AI researchers hand-picked for their technical acumen or seasoned executives who decided to make the leap to the buzzy lab.
Anthropic obtained certification for roughly 80 H-1B roles during the first two quarters of fiscal 2026. Its federal filings from the process show how much the company offers these foreign-born workers in base pay. The filings don’t include bonuses or equity compensation, which often accounts for a huge portion of a total pay package, especially given Anthropic’s jump in valuation to $965 billion this May. Still, the base salaries in the filings help explain why the AI lab is one of the corporate world’s most in-demand employers.
The hunt for talent has pushed AI’s standout companies to hire more employees overseas. As Business Insider previously reported, although several tech giants pulled back on H-1B visa applications in the second quarter of fiscal 2026, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia each ramped up their applications.
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In addition, the fight for talent has grown so red-hot that researchers often negotiate multimillion-dollar pay packages. Anthropic has a major selling point: its booming valuation means that workers who’ve only been at the company for a few years have seen their stock options multiply into the millions.
The company has managed to retain its workers at a higher rate than other labs, SignalFire reported in an analysis last year, and it notched recent wins in the talent battle by poaching researchers from Google.
Anthropic declined to comment for this story.
Here’s how much the company behind Claude pays across other key roles.
Member of technical staff salaries
Member of Technical Staff: $133,952 to $1,380,000
Member of Technical Staff (Manager): $134,139 to $850,000
Member of Technical Staff, Reinforcement Learning Researcher: $112,778 to $500,000
Product salaries
Product Design Manager: $140,254 to $385,000
Product Operations: $125,000 to $500,000
Finance, marketing, and other salaries
Accounting: $141,378 to $230,000
Commercial Counsel: $198,765 to $320,000
Compute Capacity: $187,574 to $300,000
Finance & Strategy: $182,978 to $310,000
Finance Systems: $152,152 to $315,000
Marketing: $159,328 to $200,000
Partnerships: $227,760 to $248,500
Research Operations: $125,000 to $500,000
Technical Sales: $155,522 to $500,000
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