Revenue and staff data for Anthropic and OpenAI come from Epoch AI’s AI Companies database, which compiles figures from company disclosures and media reports. Because staff count figures haven’t been reported for Anthropic or OpenAI as recently as revenue figures, we assume staffing has continued to grow at the average rate observed over the prior 6 months.

We compared revenue per employee against public tech companies in the Forbes Global 2000 list. To identify tech companies, we filtered to those with industries listed as “IT Software & Services”, “Semiconductors”, or “Technology Hardware & Equipment”.

For our visualization, we plotted RPE for comparison tech companies (Nvidia, Google, Apple, and Meta), using figures from annual 10-K filings. Note that Nvidia’s 10-K figures suggest a slightly higher RPE of $5.1M compared to Forbes’ reported figure of $4.4M. We also identified revenues and headcounts at the time of each company’s IPO from their IPO prospectuses.

Because Anthropic and OpenAI’s revenues and staff counts are reported sporadically and are not temporally aligned, we have to estimate the current value for staff count. The RPEs shown are therefore approximate. The temporal precision of AI labs’ reported figures is also imperfect and hard to verify – for instance, a report of a staff count on one day might correspond to a number obtained months earlier.