Anthropic hired 33 counterintelligence staff this year as AI labs court former spies

Nov 15, 2026
Revelio data compiled by Reuters shows Anthropic's counterintelligence hiring more than doubled from 2025, with OpenAI rising to 22 hires.

Anthropic has hired 33 employees for counterintelligence functions so far in 2026, up from 14 in 2025 and nine in 2024, according to workforce data from Revelio Labs compiled by Reuters, Fortune reports. OpenAI's counterintelligence hiring rose to 22 this year from nine in 2025.

Most of these roles pay between $200,000 and $500,000, according to Revelio. OpenAI is looking for a senior global security investigator with counterintelligence skills, Anthropic is advertising for a threat intelligence security engineer and ASML is seeking a Taiwan-based intelligence officer, Reuters reported. In 2025, Anthropic appointed former CIA deputy director David Cohen and former NSA cybersecurity director Dave Luber to its national security advisory council, and OpenAI named former NSA director Paul Nakasone to its board in 2024.

"The AI firms have snapped up a lot of security talent," Christopher Falkenberg, a former US Secret Service agent, told Reuters. The hiring push comes as Jensen Huang's resignation at Nvidia, after he admitted a relationship with a suspected Chinese spy, and the arrest of an OpenAI engineer accused of planting a listening device have put industrial espionage in the spotlight.

We hope you enjoyed this article

Consider subscribing to one of our newsletters like Cybersecurity AI Weekly or Daily AI Brief.

Also, consider following us on social media:

Cybersecurity AI AI Brief AI Brief (X)
Free newsletter

Cybersecurity AI Weekly

Weekly newsletter about AI in Cybersecurity.

Guide
Specialist Ambient Medical Scribe Vendors

Specialist Ambient Medical Scribe Vendors

AI scribes that turn medical consultations into draft clinical notes

Whitepaper

Tensordyne Napier: What If One Rack Could Do the Work of Nine?

Tensordyne

This Tensordyne whitepaper presents Napier, an inference-focused AI processor and rack-scale system based on the company’s TDN Math logarithmic number system. It examines infrastructure requirements for large mixture-of-experts and agentic models, compares major inference architecture approaches, and details the TDN AIP processor, TDN72 pod, TDN Link fabric, and Napier Ultra configuration. The paper reports simulation-based performance, cost, and accuracy-validation results, including Tensordyne’s projected comparison of one Napier rack with a nine-rack Nvidia Rubin plus Groq deployment; the chip is reported as taped out and in fabrication.

Read more

You may also like

Free, six days a week

Daily AI Brief: the AI news that matters, in your inbox.