Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has privately expressed concern that new talent is joining the company for money rather than mission, according to an Axios report on August 3, 2026. Despite public mockery, Anthropic is hiring engineers 2.68 times faster than losing them, with a two-year retention rate of 80 percent, leading Google DeepMind at 78 percent, OpenAI at 67 percent, and Meta at 64 percent. Engineers at OpenAI were eight times more likely to leave for Anthropic than the reverse, and at DeepMind the ratio was nearly 11 to one in Anthropic's favor. The report followed Lilian Weng, a co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, stepping down around July 28 after seven months of health struggles. By July 29, OpenAI confirmed she was rejoining to lead recursive self-improvement research. She was the fourth Thinking Machines co-founder to leave within a year. The company launched in February 2025 with 42 founding members; by May, 13 had departed. Andrew Tulloch left for Meta in October 2025, and Barret Zoph and Luke Metz returned to OpenAI in January 2026. Thinking Machines released its first model, Inkling, on July 15, a 975-billion-parameter system. Google also lost two prominent researchers in June, including Noam Shazeer departing for OpenAI.