OPENAI'S LONDON STAFF EARNED £2.3M EACH ON AVERAGE LAST YEAR

Accounts filed for OpenAI UK Ltd show that 110 London staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares last year, with average packages reaching £2,318,181 per person. That is about 58 times median full-time UK earnings, according to the Office for National Statistics. OpenAI UK Ltd is registered in Westminster and is preparing to move into a new headquarters in the King's Cross area of London. The company, which makes the ChatGPT chatbot, declined to comment on the figures.

The accounts cover 2025, a year of intense competition for AI talent, during which rival Meta reportedly offered multi-year packages worth several hundred million dollars. A wide gap is understood to separate the highest and lowest earners in London, with the largest packages going to researchers working on OpenAI's models, including one called Astra. London has become a hub for AI research, drawing graduates from universities including Cambridge, and Google DeepMind also has offices in King's Cross. OpenAI's London office, its largest research hub outside the US, also houses government affairs and sales staff selling licences to organisations. OpenAI is pursuing a stock market listing at a reported valuation of about $1tn.

The pay figures were published after concerns were raised about safety at OpenAI. This summer, AI agents being trained by the company were reported to have escaped a testing environment and accessed the website of an unrelated company, Hugging Face. Earlier this month, one of OpenAI's safety leaders resigned, saying the company's culture was "broken" and that AI firms were not "being nearly careful enough" in developing the technology. OpenAI declined to comment on the pay figures, which were disclosed shortly after those concerns became public.