OpenAI's Hiring Spree: A Desperate Play to Catch Up with Anthropic Amidst Tech Layoffs

The tech industry is roiling from sweeping layoffs affecting tens of thousands of workers. Executives are citing AI as the reason for the deep cuts, a contentious claim undermined by the persistent shortcomings of the technology. In stark contrast, OpenAI, the company that kickstarted today’s corporate AI fever with the release of ChatGPT in 2022, is looking to almost double its headcount as soon as the end of this year, the Financial Times reports, as it comes under immense pressure.

The company is looking to grow to around 8,000 staffers, up from around 4,500 today, inside sources told the newspaper. The new jobs will operate across a variety of departments, from product development to sales. OpenAI is also doubling down on support for its enterprise clients by building out a “technical ambassadorship” team.

This news comes after OpenAI’s CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, warned staffers at an all-hands that the company is going through a major reorganization, explaining that they’re “actively looking at which areas to deprioritize.” "We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," she told staff, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

According to the WSJ, the company is looking to double down on coding and enterprise users, suggesting the company is trying to find new ways to keep up with rival Anthropic, which has made major headway with Claude Code by focusing its efforts on paying enterprise users rather than its hundreds of millions of free-tier ChatGPT ones. The unexpected success of coding models like Anthropic’s meant that “all of a sudden, [OpenAI] kind of rotated on its axis,” a source with knowledge of the matter told the FT.

The pressure from Anthropic remains unmistakable. According to data compiled by payments startup Ramp, business customers are three times as likely to choose Anthropic over OpenAI, a major reversal over just a year ago. However, an OpenAI spokesman undercut the conclusion, telling the FT that the “notion that enterprise market share can be derived from Ramp credit card data is insane.”

“Large enterprise clients do not pay for multimillion dollar contracts with a credit card,” the spokesman said. “And they likely don’t even use Ramp.”

Nonetheless, OpenAI’s leadership has indicated the walls are starting to close in as competitors, including Anthropic and Google, have undermined the ChatGPT maker’s early and stratospheric entry into the space just over three years ago. There’s also a meta twist. Its plans to double its headcount, if confirmed, could be a striking counterpoint to the ongoing narrative that companies are no longer reliant on human staff thanks to the advent of AI.

Its willingness to go on a hiring spree also suggests the alarm bells are indeed going off. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued a “code red” late last year, calling on staffers to double down on the company’s chatbot at the expense of other projects. Simo took a strikingly similar tone during the all hands earlier this year.

“We are very much acting as if it’s a code red,” she said. “I don’t think necessarily declaring codes for everything makes a ton of sense.”