Obligatory levels.fyi warning: Anyone can anonymously submit data, and for SV the reported amounts tend to skew a bit low.
At the time of this post OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral are not public companies. "Stock" values can mean either options or restricted stock units, in either case they mean jack and shit to individual employees until IPO. OpenAI is particularly weird in this regard in that prior to 2026 they called these "Profit Participation Units," and afterwards they switched to more conventional-ish RSUs.
Mistral, being smaller (and worse yet,
French), has less
public izzat farming reported data than their SV counterparts. While solution architects* sure love their prooooompting they often have variable compensation that doesn't really fit into the flat salary peon bucket. So with that in mind I'm going to look at the
software engineer salary data for Mistral.
*overpaid sales consultants paid to make wildly unrealistic promises while dumping responsibility on the actual engineers to implement the damn thing
These are some numbers alright. Some are pretty great for France, others are more in line with entry level engineering positions anywhere in the developed world.
Now let's look at
Anthropic. Right away the numbers are just plain bigger and there's way more reporting data (amusingly their solutions architects appear to be paid less, though this is likely a case of omitting sales commissions).
Also notice that only Senior/Lead SEs are listed. Staff-level SEs at Anthropic aren't saying shit about their comp.
Most reported Anthropic SE salaries from the past two years are in the $300k range, with stock varying wildly. I haven't bothered to wade through the jeets farming izzat on Blind, but I'll guess that the stock comp pre-2024 is in the form of ISOs, and in RSUs after. Regardless, it's funny money until IPO.
Now OpenAI, with all of its "emerging megacorp on VC steroids but totally a nonprofit" status, I'll let their stochastic parrot explain the pre-2026 Profit Participation Unit comp structure because I don't really care and you, dear reader, probably care even less:
Levels.fyi also has an article on OpenAI's comp structure. It seems to be confusing even for employees.
This little bit from the slop machine about averages is important, though, and lines up with what I'll say about FAANG/Mag7/etc later:
Important caveat: average stock comp is not median comp. At a place like OpenAI, a few monster grants for senior researchers/executives can make the average look cartoonish. The median senior engineer/researcher still may be getting very large grants, but “$1.5M average” should not be read as “everyone gets $1.5M/year.”
Who gives a shit, you're here to see the big numbers.
I got some big OpenAI comp numbers for ya right here
And so many submissions that I had to zoom out a bit to capture the last few months. The actual SV salary range ($200-400k) is wider than Anthropic ($300-350k), but the reported PPU grants are completely fucking bonkers, with one L5 in Research getting a cool million per year in paper funny money.
How much of this valuation will OpenAI employees actually see? I don't know.
