At a Glance
- Three top executives quit Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines lab yesterday and were hired by OpenAI the same day
- Two more Thinking Machines staffers are expected to join OpenAI within weeks
- OpenAI senior safety researcher Andrea Vallone defected to Anthropic to work under Jan Leike
- Shopify engineering director Max Stoiber is building OpenAI’s rumored operating system
- Why it matters: The talent war shows how fiercely AI labs are competing for limited expertise as they race to ship new products
OpenAI has absorbed the entire senior leadership of rival startup Thinking Machines less than 24 hours after they resigned, according to Sarah L. Montgomery reporting for News Of Philadelphia. The lightning-fast poaching caps a week of musical chairs across the AI industry that also saw safety talent move from OpenAI to Anthropic while a veteran Shopify executive joined OpenAI’s secretive OS project.
Executive Exodus at Thinking Machines
Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines lost three co-founders yesterday in what sources described as an abrupt and acrimonious exit. The departing executives immediately announced they had accepted roles at OpenAI, triggering speculation that the ChatGPT maker had orchestrated the departures.
Alex Heath reports that the drain is not over: two additional Thinking Machines employees are expected to resign and join OpenAI within the next few weeks. The expected departures would leave the young startup without roughly one-third of its technical staff.
The talent raid continues a pattern of aggressive recruitment by OpenAI, which has grown from 500 employees to more than 3,000 since 2023 by luring researchers and engineers with above-market equity packages.
Anthropic Strikes Back on Safety
While OpenAI absorbs Thinking Machines, rival lab Anthropic has countered by hiring away OpenAI’s senior safety research lead Andrea Vallone. The Verge first reported the move, which sees Vallone leave OpenAI after three years focusing on how large language models handle mental-health prompts.
Vallone’s exit lands days after OpenAI faced criticism for ChatGPT’s overly agreeable responses, a phenomenon researchers call sycophancy. His new role places him under Jan Leike, the prominent alignment researcher who quit OpenAI in 2024 and accused the company of prioritizing product speed over safety.
Anthropic has now hired four former OpenAI safety leads since 2023 as it positions itself as the more cautious alternative to its better-funded competitor.
Shopify Veteran Joins Secret OS Team
OpenAI ended the week with one more high-profile hire, announcing that Max Stoiber will leave his post as director of engineering at Shopify to join what he described as a “small high-agency team” inside OpenAI.
Stoiber’s arrival fuels long-standing rumors that OpenAI is developing its own operating system designed to run large language models natively on devices. The project, first hinted at in a 2025 job posting for “mobile OS engineers,” is believed to be separate from OpenAI’s work on AI-powered smartphones with partners like Samsung.
Stoiber oversaw Shopify’s storefront infrastructure, which serves over 1.75 million merchants and processes $200 billion in annual sales. His expertise in building scalable consumer platforms is expected to help OpenAI move its models from the cloud onto edge devices.
Accelerating Talent War
The flurry of moves underscores how tightly knit the AI labor market has become. With only a few thousand researchers worldwide capable of training frontier models, companies are offering multimillion-dollar retention packages and accelerating stock vesting schedules to prevent defections.
Non-compete clauses are rarely enforced in California, allowing engineers to switch employers within days instead of months. The result is a near real-time reshuffling of teams as startups scale up or get gutted overnight.
OpenAI’s recruitment spree has drawn regulatory attention. The Federal Trade Commission opened a preliminary inquiry last year into whether the company’s hiring practices amount to an illegal acquisition of competitors, though no charges have been filed.
What Comes Next
All eyes now turn to Thinking Machines, which has not yet named replacements for its departed leadership. The startup raised $350 million in September 2025 at a $2 billion valuation, promising to build more interpretable AI systems than those offered by OpenAI or Anthropic.
Investors in that round, including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, are pressing Murati for a revised roadmap that shows how the company will deliver on its promises without the technical team that pitched them.
OpenAI, for its part, is expected to integrate the new hires into its post-o1 reasoning model division. CEO Sam Altman told staff this week that the company will ship “several major releases” before mid-year as it races Google, Anthropic and China’s DeepSeek for enterprise customers.
Key Takeaways
- OpenAI hired three Thinking Machines co-founders hours after they quit, and two more employees are expected to follow
- Anthropic retaliated by recruiting OpenAI safety lead Andrea Vallone, strengthening its alignment team under Jan Leike
- Shopify veteran Max Stoiber is the latest executive to join OpenAI’s hush-hush operating-system effort
- The talent shuffle highlights the tiny pool of elite AI researchers and the fierce competition to secure them
