OpenAI Research Positions Down to 7%, Sales Roles Double: Recruitment Data Reveals Four Major Lab Strategy Divisions

According to monitoring by 1M AI News, the AI research organization Epoch AI analyzed the public recruitment information of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind, extracting strategic differences from their job structures. The data was collected in early March 2026. The most notable trend is the surge in sales positions. The proportion of marketing and sales roles at Anthropic increased from 17% a year ago to 31%, while OpenAI rose from 18% to 28%, making them the largest recruitment categories for each. The proportion of research positions has significantly shrunk, with Anthropic at only 12% and OpenAI at just 7%. The fastest-growing segment is the technical sales roles that help clients implement AI (such as AI Success Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, etc.), with Anthropic’s share rising from 5% to 11% and OpenAI’s from 11% to 17%, reflecting a bottleneck where clients ‘buy but cannot use’ the technology. The differentiation in product strategies is even more pronounced: 1. OpenAI is pursuing a fully integrated vertical strategy. Fifteen positions are directed towards a portable hardware device (equipped with a camera, custom chips, and edge model inference), with another 21 positions related to self-developed chips, and seven robotics positions involving simulation training and mass production, while also incubating social products and job platforms. 2. DeepMind is similarly betting on hardware, recruiting for XR glasses and humanoid robot (including dexterous hands) related positions. 3. Anthropic does not develop its own chips or hardware, relying on external partners for infrastructure construction and hosting, focusing product investment on Claude Code (5 positions) and core model APIs. 4. xAI has 27 internal data annotation positions, being the only lab publicly hiring annotators on a large scale, while other companies either outsource or do not disclose such hiring. In terms of agent training, both Anthropic’s Universes team and OpenAI’s Synthetic RL team are building ultra-realistic RL environments for long-cycle agent training, showing a high degree of convergence in direction. In the government sales sector, OpenAI and Anthropic each have 10 government sales positions (covering federal, defense, and local governments), while xAI has set up international government sales roles in London and Dubai.