What’s Trending: The AI Talent Wars
November 4, 2025
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We have been in a chaotic last few years, where companies have been racing each other to see who will invent the newest, greatest, and most life-changing innovation yet. So, the 21st-century space race is the AI talent wars.
The AI wars have companies competing to become the leader, as seen with Google in the early 2000s and Meta in the 2010s.
Kitty Wheeler breaks down the AI talent wars for AI Magazine, stating that acquihiring, a practice where companies hire the star employee and leave smaller companies to drown, has upended Silicon Valley.
“Major AI players such as Meta, OpenAI, Apple and Amazon have been actively seeking to attract talent either from each other or from emerging AI startups.”
The idea behind this is that if AI “learns” from the engineers, having the most brilliant team is essential to make the next big jump in AI tech. This has heated the rivalry that several companies have with each other, with OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, calling it mercenary.
This new practice has made three different senators urge antitrust authorities to investigate the companies. Google has now been having such legal troubles.
According to Eugene Kim, not everyone has been so lucky in these talent wars as Amazon has struggled to hire engineers. This has more to do with the culture that once helped the company rise to the top, but has sunk its reputation, as its AI division isn’t as impressive as that of other companies.
The culture in mind is that of penny-pinching, which once helped them. This means that they haven’t been offering big compensation for talent, instead sticking to their egalitarian pay principles, refusing to play into the big-dollar spending that has characterized this war. But that’s not all, an insider recruiter points out that flexibility is another of the biggest detractors in negotiations.
“Even if a competitor pays less, people are open to taking the job if they can stay remote, this person said.”
Amazon’s culture focuses on returning to the office, as the company believes that working in the same physical space is necessary. These two big issues have meant that finding talent is hard for them, leading AWS to fall behind in the AI race, which also damages their reputation.
Lila Maclellan writes about the company culture war that’s actually playing behind the scenes of the AI drama. With the idea behind the race being to try to get the most market share, companies keep trying to steal talent from one another, leading to big spending on their employees. And yet, not everyone is moving jobs as soon as they get a big offer.
AI companies have been run by big personalities who tend to believe that they are changing the world. This has led some workers to stay with companies because of the mission, vision, and ethics they preach. This shouldn’t be a surprise when Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and other tech giants began, they also had big missions that were smeared by their own grey moral code.
Still, despite everything, for many it comes down to money, creating a possible AI bubble, which troubles experts and the government. This has had people wondering how Big Tech is winning the AI talent war, especially as it’s constantly cannibalizing each other.
“Despite recent concerns about an AI bubble, he told Fortune, the dynamics of this new market mean companies have rational reasons for spending big.”
Maclelland writes that there are four factors that are key to ensuring that a company’s culture is forefront and backed by its employees:
The AI talent wars have taken over Silicon Valley, and until someone is a clear leader or the government steps in to regulate what’s been happening, it probably won’t stop. This practice has given rise to many shady acquisitions, or more accurately, acquihires that can be stifling creativity, and yet some people remain in their companies for the love of the work and mission they have.
The culture that has come up is a big lesson for many other companies, even if they have nothing to do with AI, on how to engage employees through a shared purpose, mission, and vision. Leaders should take note of what these AI giants are doing to capture their workforce’s interest through these basic concepts and try to replicate them to improve engagement in their own companies.
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