While tech companies are pouring billions into AI infrastructure, they are also competing fiercely for AI talent — and the AI boom is reshaping the choices available to workers.
Alongside established giants like Apple, Google, and Amazon, frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic now offer the chance to work at the edge of a technological shift, with potentially significant financial upside. Meanwhile, years of tech layoffs have made job security a bigger consideration for many workers.
We asked eight tech workers about their dream employer, the Big Tech companies they’re most and least interested in, and whether they’ve pursued jobs at OpenAI or Anthropic. (Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.)
AI labs have come calling. I haven’t pursued them.
Abhinav Bohra
Abhinav Bohra is a senior applied scientist at Amazon. He’s in his 30s and lives in Seattle.
Have you tried to land a job at an AI lab like OpenAI or Anthropic?
A couple of recruiters for AI labs have reached out to me, including one at another Big Tech company. I took the calls but never pursued them.
Labs hire people to make models smarter. I build recommendation engines, and a frontier lab has no real use for one yet: no catalog, no sellers, no shoppers to rank for. The day one of them runs an actual marketplace, people like me get very interested in them. We’re not there yet.
Between Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA, which company would you most (or least) want to work for?
Amazon, which is boring, so here’s the runner-up: NVIDIA. Recommendation at scale has become an inference cost problem. Running a big model once is cheap. Running it for every search and every shopper in real time is where the money goes. When your unit of progress is the millisecond, NVIDIA sits upstream of everything.
Each company could be a good fit for someone in my field, but I also imagine they all have teams I’d love and teams I’d dread.
I’d choose Anthropic for its values
Mike Kostersitz
Mike Kostersitz is a senior director, product management at Nike. He’s in his early 60s and lives in Oregon.
If you could work for any tech company, what would it be?
If I had to look outside Nike, Anthropic would be my dream employer. The pull is real, and the company’s stated values align more closely with my own than some other companies.
I took note when earlier this year, Anthropic refused a Pentagon push to strip out restrictions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons use, a stand their own CFO said could cost the company billions in revenue. That’s the kind of “values over dollars” moment most companies only talk about.
I don’t expect that to hold forever. Once they IPO, the pull toward shareholder value will grow, and I’d expect other priorities to erode over time as a result. But I’d still pick Anthropic as my top choice.
Between Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA, which company would you most (or least) want to work for?
Apple, hands down, I love the products and what the culture represents. Least would be Amazon. I have a number of friends who are current or former Amazon employees on the tech side, and not one of them has ever seemed excited to go to work there or felt like they were making a difference, beyond the paycheck being strong.
Business Insider is speaking with tech workers who’ve found themselves at a corporate crossroads — whether due to a layoff, resignation, job search, or shifting workplace expectations.
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I haven’t applied to OpenAI or Anthropic
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This tech worker is a software engineer at Meta.
If you could work for any tech company, what would it be?
Honestly, the answer might be where I already am: Meta. The frontier labs get the headlines, but hyperscalers like Meta and Google are doing the same caliber of work: not just core model training and fine-tuning but building the insane infrastructure needed to serve this to billions of users.
One reason I haven’t tried to land a job at an AI lab like OpenAI or Anthropic is that the labs are running on investor capital, while the hyperscalers fund their AI push from core businesses that already make enormous money. They have different risk profiles, and I’ve been happy with mine.
Between Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA, which company would you most (or least) want to work for?
Most: Setting Meta aside, Google is the obvious choice for me. It’s one of the few companies doing everything in-house, from TPUs to frontier models to products. That full stack under one roof is appealing.
Least: Probably Apple, and honestly that’s about fit, not the company. They build incredible products and their engineering is world class, but their working model is very different from what I’m used to. Teams there tend to work on a focused slice under a lot of confidentiality, while my career so far has been end-to-end ownership, seeing a system from design through production and operations.
I’d choose SpaceX over any Big Tech company or AI lab
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
This tech worker is a tech lead at a company in the insurance industry. He’s in his early 40s and lives in Atlanta.
If you could work for any tech company, what would it be?
If I could work for any tech company tomorrow, I’d choose SpaceX. Few organizations on the planet operate with that level of ambition, engineering rigor, and mission clarity. Being part of a team pushing toward interplanetary travel would be an opportunity to contribute to something far bigger than any one company.
Between Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA, which company would you most (or least) want to work for?
NVIDIA is the company I would choose. It is defining the future of accelerated computing and AI rather than reacting to it.
NVIDIA and the AI labs are compelling, but I’d still choose Google
Sachin Jain
Sachin Jain is a data analyst at Google.
If you could work for any tech company, what would it be?
It would still be Google, and I’m genuinely grateful that I get to work there. That said, OpenAI and Anthropic would be incredibly compelling as well. They’re at the forefront of one of the biggest technological shifts of our generation, and I think any engineer or data professional would find that exciting.
Between Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA, which company would you most (or least) want to work for?
Aside from Google, I’d probably say NVIDIA. They’ve built an incredible competitive moat by creating a level of dependency across the AI ecosystem that’s hard to match.
Beyond the business itself, I’ve always admired the culture they’ve cultivated. Employees don’t seem to be constantly looking over their shoulders, worried about the next round of layoffs, which is becoming increasingly rare in tech. And of course, Jensen Huang is someone I really respect.
I’d rather work at a smaller employer than the hottest tech company
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This tech worker is a software engineer at a startup. She’s in her 20s and lives in the Northeast.
If you could work for any tech company, what would it be?
What I value most today is a remote-first environment, the ability to influence what gets built, and a culture where I can spend my time solving interesting technical problems instead of navigating constant internal politics. At this stage of my career, I’d rather work at a smaller company where I have meaningful ownership than be one person in a very large organization.
Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are particularly high on my list. I’m not especially motivated by working at whichever company is getting the most attention at the moment. Prestige and compensation alone aren’t what motivate my career decisions anymore.
Between Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA, which company would you most (or least) want to work for?
I’d probably lean toward Alphabet, Microsoft, or Apple, but the specific role would matter much more than the company name. I’m less drawn to Meta than some of the others because it has gone through significant organizational changes and layoffs in recent years.
Anthropic is my dream employer — I’d maybe pass on Microsoft
Illustration by Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
This tech worker works for a large tech company.
If you could work for any tech company, what would it be?
If I could walk into any company tomorrow, it would be Anthropic. I like that they are going after the enterprise side and actually improving specific lines of business, not just shipping a chatbot. And with the talk of them heading toward public markets, the upside is hard to ignore.
Between Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA, which company would you most (or least) want to work for?
Most to least: Amazon, Alphabet, NVIDIA, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft last.
Microsoft is last for me because I think they are behind on AI, and it shows on the consumer product side. Copilot, from my own use and from what I hear in the market, has not landed the way it should and people are underwhelmed.
OpenAI tops my list
Sneja Shah
Sneja Shah is a senior technical program manager at the software company Red Hat. She’s in her 30s and lives in California.
If you could work for any tech company, what would it be?
If I had to look outside my current employer, OpenAI would be my top choice. The opportunity to work on products that are fundamentally changing how people work, learn, and create is incredibly exciting.
Anthropic would also be high on my list because of its emphasis on responsible AI development and long-term safety.
Between Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA, which company would you most (or least) want to work for?
Among those companies, I’d choose NVIDIA because it’s enabling nearly every major advancement in AI. Microsoft would be a close second because of how rapidly it’s integrating AI across enterprise products and productivity tools.
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