TL;DR
OpenAI and Anthropic are not poaching researchers in Asia but executives who understand both how a US head office allocates money and how local governments and customers actually work.
The Silicon Valley fight over AI talent has moved to Asia. OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring people away from Google, Microsoft and Amazon to build teams in India and Singapore — to sell products and cultivate regulators.
Not researchers — mini-CEOs
In the past year, US AI giants have taken at least nine executives from the Asian arms of American big tech. Meta's vice president for India and Southeast Asia, Devanathan, left after a decade for OpenAI, to run Southeast Asia and Australia.
In the US, frontier labs compete for the best researchers and engineers. In Asia, the sought-after people are the ones who can turn AI into a business.
Vyas, an executive recruiter at ZRG, says that once a company decides a region is a strategic growth market, it starts looking for people who can essentially operate as mini-CEOs.
The shortage is the same few hundred people
Analyst Gogia says the prized asset is not generic familiarity with American technology but dual institutional literacy: knowing how a US head office allocates capital and risk, and knowing how Indian customers, governments and partners turn global strategy into local reality.
The number of people who have run a country-level P&L for a global tech company, negotiated with Indian regulators and built enterprise trust at scale is maybe a few hundred across all of Big Tech in India.
OpenAI's first hire in India came from Truecaller, and its Asia-Pacific director spent 13 years at Google. Experience cannot be created overnight, so everyone is chasing the same small group.
In one line: no matter how good the model is, someone still has to go and close the deal over dinner.
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