Tax forms filed by the nonprofit OpenAI provide insight into the enormous salaries and bonuses paid to AI specialists across the world
even at nonprofits Haley Britzky / Axios : AI researchers are in high demand, and their salaries prove it Aparajita Sharma / PiunikaWeb : AI researchers are making money like crazy, over $1 million in some cases Facebook: David E. Weekly : I met with a Stanford mentee tonight and really enjoyed it … Tweets: Marshall Kirkpatrick / @marshallk : If someone is going to pay top AI talent $1m+ per year (and companies will) then I'm glad @OpenAI can do it in their quest for AI to benefit humanity instead of corporate interests http://www.techmeme.com/... NYTimes Tech / @nytimestech : OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab founded by Elon Musk, released tax forms revealing enormous salaries of top researchers. Top figure: $1.9 million. And figures at the bigger companies are higher. http://www.nytimes.com/... Andrew Ng / @andrewyng : NYT quotes the high salaries of Pieter Abbeel (my former PhD student), Ian Goodfellow (former undergrad) and Ilya Sutskever (former post doc). With http://deeplearning.ai/ lets create more generations of successful AI people! @CadeMetz http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When the Times first reported in late 2017 that typical AI specialists were drawing $300K-$500K in salary and stock, the numbers read as anecdote. The nonprofit's own tax filings now put hard figures on it — top compensation around $1.9M at an organization explicitly structured to benefit humanity rather than shareholders.
That 2018 snapshot turned out to be the floor, not the ceiling: the same publication later documented million-dollar packages and whole-team poaching driven by a candidate shortage, and by mid-2025 mid-to-senior researchers at Big Tech were drawing $500K to $2M total pay. OpenAI itself told investors its stock compensation hit $4.4B, 119% of revenue for the period.
First-order effects
- OpenAI's nonprofit governance comes under immediate scrutiny: filings showing ~$1.9M packages hand critics evidence that 'benefit humanity' and market-rate talent costs are being reconciled inside a tax-exempt structure.
Second-order effects
- Competitors are forced to match with non-cash sweeteners — Big Tech recruiters now lead with compute access, as when Meta dangled 30K GPUs to prospective hires during the talent wars.
Third-order effects
- If OpenAI's projection that stock comp falls below 10% of revenue by 2030 holds, the industry's cost structure normalizes from founder-scarce premiums toward a settled, if still extreme, senior-researcher labor market — with equity, not salary, doing most of the work.
The trend: AI researcher compensation has escalated from a 2018 nonprofit curiosity into a defining line item of AI unit economics, with equity packages now rivaling infrastructure spend.