OpenAI research positions are down to only 7%, while sales positions have doubled: Recruitment data reveals four major laboratory route divisions.

According to 1M AI News monitoring, the AI research institution Epoch AI analyzed the public job postings of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind to extract the strategic differences among them based on the job structure. Data was collected in early March 2026.

The most noticeable trend is the surge in sales positions. The proportion of market and sales roles at Anthropic increased from 17% a year ago to 31%, while OpenAI rose from 18% to 28%, making them the largest recruitment categories for each company. Research positions saw a significant contraction, with Anthropic down to just 12% and OpenAI to only 7%. The fastest-growing segment is the technical sales roles that help clients implement AI (such as AI Success Engineer and Forward Deployed Engineer), with Anthropic’s share rising from 5% to 11% and OpenAI’s from 11% to 17%, reflecting the bottleneck of clients “buying but not using.”

The differentiation in product roadmaps is even more apparent:

1. OpenAI is pursuing a full-stack vertical integration. 15 positions are aimed at a portable hardware device (equipped with a camera, custom chips, and edge model inference), with another 21 positions related to self-developed chips, and 7 robotics positions involving simulation training and mass production, while also incubating social products and job platforms.
2. DeepMind is also betting on hardware, recruiting for positions related to XR glasses and humanoid robots (including dexterous hands).
3. Anthropic does not develop its own chips or hardware, relying on external partners for infrastructure construction and hosting, with product investments focused on Claude Code (5 positions) and core model APIs.
4. xAI has 27 internal data annotation positions, being the only lab publicly hiring a large number of annotators, while 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 hyper-realistic RL environments for long-cycle agent training, with highly converging directions. In the government sales sector, OpenAI and Anthropic each have 10 government sales positions (covering federal, defense, and local governments), while xAI has established sales roles aimed at international governments in London and Dubai.