• Dario Amodei made one thing clear: Anthropic won't join the Big Tech talent bidding war.
• Massive salary changes could "destroy" the company's culture by treating people "unfairly," he said.
• Employees turned down the offers — some "wouldn't even talk to Mark Zuckerberg," the CEO said.

When top engineers at Anthropic started receiving job offers from tech giants like Meta, Dario Amodei made one thing clear: The company wouldn't play the bidding war game.

On the "Big Technology Podcast" published Wednesday, Anthropic's CEO said he posted a message to staff declaring the company was "not willing to compromise our compensation principles, our principles of fairness" in response to outside offers.

He said Anthropic uses a level-based compensation system.

"When a candidate comes in, they get assigned a level, and we don't negotiate that level," Amodei said. "We think it's unfair. We want to have a systematic way."

"If Mark Zuckerberg throws a dart at a dartboard and hits your name, that doesn't mean you should be paid 10 times more than the guy next to you who's just as skilled," he added.

Amodei said that such massive salary changes could "destroy" a company's culture by treating people "unfairly."

Many of his employees have rejected the outside offers, and some "wouldn't even talk to Mark Zuckerberg," he said.

"This was a unifying moment for the company where we didn't give in," Amodei said. "We refuse to compromise our principles because we have the confidence that people are at Anthropic because they truly believe in the mission."

"What they are doing is trying to buy something that cannot be bought," he added.

Mark Zuckerberg highlighted some of Meta's new hires on Wednesday's earnings call.

"We're building an elite, talent-dense team," Zuckerberg said. "I've spent a lot of time building this team this quarter."

Meta and Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Bidding war for top AI talent

Amodei's comments come as Big Tech companies are paying top dollar to recruit elite AI talent, a trend that's likened to sports franchises competing for superstar athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo.

The competition reached another level when Meta recruited Scale's CEO, Alexandr Wang, last month as part of a $14.3 billion deal to take a 49% stake in his company. Then, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said Meta had tried to poach his best employees with $100 million signing bonuses.

Just weeks ago, Google paid $2.4 billion to hire the CEO and top talent of AI startup Windsurf and license its intellectual property. OpenAI had planned to buy Windsurf for $3 billion, but the deal fell apart.

"It's not a hard choice" for the team at Anthropic because "people here are so mission-oriented," the startup's cofounder, Benjamin Mann, said on a recent episode of "Lenny's Podcast."

Perplexity's CEO, Aravind Srinivas, said on a recent episode of the podcast "Decoder" that Big Tech companies need to ensure that employees are motivated by mission as well as money.

"You're encountering new kinds of challenges. You feel a lot of growth, you're learning new things. And you're getting richer, too, along the way. Why would you want to go just because you have some guaranteed payments?" he said.

• "Spend less time doom-scrolling on Instagram, spend more time using AI," said Perplexity's CEO.
• People who know how to use AI will be far more employable than those who don't, said Aravind Srinivas.
• As AI cuts headcounts, Srinivas said new jobs have to come from entrepreneurs.

It's time to ditch social media's infinite scrolling in favor of a better hobby, said Perplexity's CEO.

"Spend less time doom-scrolling on Instagram, spend more time using AI," Aravind Srinivas said on a podcast episode by Matthew Berman published Friday.

"Not because we want your usage, but simply because that's your way to add value to the new society," he added.

Srinivas, whose company is positioning itself as an AI-native alternative to Google, said those who master AI tools will have the edge in the job market.

"People who are at the frontier of using AI are going to be way more employable than people who are not," he said. "That's guaranteed to happen."

But most people are struggling to keep up with AI, Srinivas said.

"The human race has never been extremely fast at adapting," he said. "This is truly testing the limits in terms of how fast we can adapt, especially with a piece of technology that's evolving every three months or six months."

"It does take a toll on people, and maybe they just give up," he added.

The CEO said some people will lose their jobs because they can't keep up. As AI shrinks headcounts across industries, Srinivas said new jobs have to come from entrepreneurs.

"Either the other people who lose jobs end up starting companies themselves and make use of AI, or they end up learning the AI and contribute to new companies," he added.

Perplexity's head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, said in a reply to Business Insider that "history shows over and over that the most successful people are not the ones with the most knowledge but the ones with the most questions."

AI is already changing the job market

Tech leaders have been sounding the alarm about how AI is reshaping the workforce.

Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, predicted that AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar entry-level jobs within five years.

In May, he told Axios that AI companies and the government are "sugarcoating" the risks of mass job elimination in fields including technology, finance, law, and consulting, adding, "I don't think this is on people's radar."

Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called "Godfather of AI," echoed similar concerns, telling the Diary of a CEO podcast last month: "For mundane intellectual labor, AI is just going to replace everybody."

He said he'd be "terrified" to work in a call center or as a paralegal, and recommended becoming a plumber — a job he sees as safer from automation for now.

Others take a more optimistic view.

Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, said AI won't kill jobs, but it will transform how every job is done.

"I am certain 100% of everybody's jobs will be changed," he told CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday. "The work that we do in our jobs will be changed. The work will change. But it's very likely — my job has already changed."

"Some jobs will be lost. Many jobs would be created. And what I hope is that the productivity gains that we see in all the industries will lift society," he added.

Demis Hassabis, the cofounder of Google DeepMind, said in June that AI would create "very valuable jobs" and "supercharge sort of technically savvy people who are at the forefront of using these technologies."

• At 26, Kevin Choi lost half his vision to glaucoma — a progressive eye disease.
• The diagnosis sparked the start of his healthtech startup, which uses AI to detect critical diseases.
• Choi said AI can speed up and simplify screening, but it's no substitute for a doctor.

At 26, Kevin Choi got a diagnosis that changed his life: glaucoma.

It's a progressive eye disease that damages the optic nerve, often without symptoms until it's too late. By the time doctors caught it, Choi had lost half his vision.

An engineer by training — and a former rifleman in South Korea's Marine Corps — Choi thought he had a solid handle on his health.

"I was really frustrated I didn't notice that," he said.

The 2016 diagnosis still gives him "panic." But it also sparked something big.

That year, Choi teamed up with his doctor, a vitreoretinal surgeon, to cofound Mediwhale, a South Korea-based healthtech startup.

Their mission is to use AI to catch diseases before symptoms show up and cause irreversible harm.

"I'm the person who feels the value of that the most," Choi said.

The tech can screen for cardiovascular, kidney, and eye diseases through non-invasive retinal scans.

Mediwhale's technology is primarily used in South Korea, and hospitals in Dubai, Italy, and Malaysia have also adopted it.

Mediwhale said in September that it had raised $12 million in its Series A2 funding round, led by Korea Development Bank.

AI can help with fast, early screening

Choi believes AI is most powerful in the earliest stage of care: screening.

AI, he said, can help healthcare providers make faster, smarter decisions — the kind that can mean the difference between early intervention and irreversible harm.

In some conditions, "speed is the most important," Choi said. That's true for "silent killers" like heart and kidney disease, and progressive conditions like glaucoma — all of which often show no early symptoms but, unchecked, can lead to permanent damage.

For patients with chronic conditions like diabetes or obesity, the stakes are even higher. Early complications can lead to dementia, liver disease, heart problems, or kidney failure.

The earlier these risks are spotted, the more options doctors — and patients — have.

Choi said Mediwhale's AI makes it easier to triage by flagging who's low-risk, who needs monitoring, and who should see a doctor immediately.

Screening patients at the first point of contact doesn't require "very deep knowledge," Choi said. That kind of quick, low-friction risk assessment is where AI shines.

Mediwhale's tool lets patients bypass traditional procedures — including blood tests, CT scans, and ultrasounds — when screening for cardiovascular and kidney risks.

Choi also said that when patients see their risks visualized through retinal scans, they tend to take it more seriously.

AI won't replace doctors

Despite his belief in AI's power, Choi is clear: It's not a replacement for doctors.

Patients want to hear a human doctor's opinion and reassurance.

Choi also said that medicine is often messier than a clean dataset. While AI is "brilliant at solving defined problems," it lacks the ability to navigate nuance.

"Medicine often requires a different dimension of decision-making," he said.

For example: How will a specific treatment affect someone's life? Will they follow through? How is their emotional state affecting their condition? These are all variables that algorithms still struggle to read, but doctors can pick up. These insights "go beyond simple data points," Choi said.

And when patients push back — say, hesitating to start a new medication — doctors are trained to both understand why and guide them.

They are able to "navigate patients' irrational behaviours while still grounding decisions in quantitative data," he said.

"These are complex decision-making processes that extend far beyond simply processing information."

• Magnus Grimeland, the CEO and founder of the VC firm Antler, said demand for software engineers will only grow.
• AI will continue to make errors, and only software engineers will optimize this technology.
• AI will also lead to further specialization among software engineers, he said.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Magnus Grimeland, the CEO and founder of Antler, a global early-stage venture capital firm. He also cofounded Zalora, a fashion e-commerce platform in Asia. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

There have been a lot of headlines about software engineering being replaced by AI, based on the assumption that anyone can just go in and code any program with natural language. It's actually much more likely that the need and demand for great software engineers will grow in the next couple of decades.

Even the best software engineers today make errors. AI models will also continue to make errors, at least for a very long time, and the only ones who will optimize this technology are software engineers.

At least over the next 20 to 30 years, what you will see is the best software engineers getting a tremendous amount of leverage to be more efficient and deliver better products faster. Software engineers will work in a different way than before.

In the not-too-distant future, we also need to adapt to an entirely new computer ecosystem, and the ones who are going to be able to do that are software engineers. We've already started investing in a few companies that are preparing for that.

Further specialization

AI will also lead to further specialization.

Today, software engineers are grouped a bit more generally. Some work on hardware, some on different types of software languages, and some are great mobile developers.

The complexity of the type of roles that you'll see for software engineers will increase significantly because the way this is being implemented in different industries will require specialized goals.

You'll also see fewer general engineers and more people who are really good at one specific thing.

Software engineers will work closer with businesses. AI will enable business leaders to work better with engineering departments because they can tinker with the early versions of the products themselves.

This should lead to more efficiency in terms of how the technical and less technical parts of the business work together, and that should actually give software engineering an even more important role in the business.

A new era of learning

When we were building Zalora and now at Antler, some of the best engineers we hired in Southeast Asia were self-taught.

They didn't have computer science degrees from universities. They read up on the internet, tinkered, and built their own programs.

AI has made it better than ever to teach people — as long as they have the right drive and basic intrinsics to learn how to become a great software engineer.

You'll see many more self-help people who are just as good as people who've done a full university degree.