AI research institution Epoch AI analyzed the public recruitment information from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google's DeepMind, extracting the strategic differences among them from the job structures. The data was collected in early March 2026.
The most noticeable trend is the surge in sales positions. The proportion of market sales positions at Anthropic has increased from 17% a year ago to 31%, while OpenAI has risen from 18% to 28%, both becoming the largest recruitment categories for their respective companies. The proportion of research positions has significantly shrunk, with Anthropic only having 12% and OpenAI only 7%. The fastest-growing segment is the technical sales roles that help customers implement AI (AI Success Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, etc.), with Anthropic's share in this category rising from 5% to 11% and OpenAI's from 11% to 17%, reflecting the bottleneck of customers who 'have bought it but don't know how to use it.'
The differentiation of product lines is more evident:
1. OpenAI is fully integrated across the stack. 15 positions point to a portable hardware device (equipped with a camera, custom chip, and edge model inference), and there are another 21 positions related to in-house chip development, 7 positions in robotics involve simulation training and mass production, and they are also incubating social products and job platforms.
2. DeepMind is also betting on hardware, hiring for positions related to XR glasses and humanoid robots (including dexterous hands).
3. Anthropic does not develop in-house chips or hardware; its infrastructure relies on external partners for construction and hosting, with product investment focused on Claude Code (5 positions) and core model API.
4. xAI has 27 internal data annotation positions and is the only lab publicly hiring a large number of annotators; other companies either outsource or do not disclose.
In terms of Agent training, Anthropic's Universes team and OpenAI's Synthetic RL team are both building ultra-realistic RL environments for long-cycle Agent training, with highly similar directions. In the government sales sector, OpenAI and Anthropic each have 10 government sales positions (covering federal, defense, and local governments), while xAI has set up sales positions targeting international governments in London and Dubai.$ETH
