Silicon Valley has seen a rare wave of talent migration over the past two years, with multiple CTOs from billion-dollar tech companies like Workday, Instagram, and You.com collectively choosing to leave their senior management positions and join Anthropic as Members of Technical Staff (MTS), returning to front-line development work. This trend has not only sparked heated discussion in the tech industry but is also being interpreted as a strong signal that the power structure of the AI era is undergoing a fundamental transformation.
CTO Musical Chairs: From Workday to Instagram, the Tech Elites Who Collectively “Downgraded”
This wave of departures began as early as early 2025. According to public information and media reports, several heavyweight technology leaders have successively joined Anthropic:
- Niki Parmar(January 2025): Former CTO of Adept AI, also a co-author of the groundbreaking 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which established the Transformer architecture that underpins all mainstream AI systems today. After joining, she participated in the development of Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
- Henry Shi(July 2025): Super.com Co-founder and CTO, who grew the company from zero to $200 million in annual revenue with over 50 million users. He shared his journey in a post on X, stating: “If AGI arrives in 2027 or 2028, I want to be at the frontier lab, sitting in the front row watching. If it doesn’t happen, I’ll understand why.”
- Former Box CTO(December 2025): Joined Anthropic as a technical team member.
- Mike Krieger(January 2026): Instagram’s co-founder and former CTO, who had joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer (CPO) back in May 2024, announced this January that he is transferring to the company’s internal Labs team as a technical team member, returning to front-line development.
- Bryan McCann(March 2026): Co-founder and CTO of You.com left and joined Anthropic as a member of the technical team.[1]
- Peter Bailis(April 2026): Former Workday CTO, who only joined Workday in May 2025 as Chief Technology Officer, departed just one year later to join Anthropic focusing on reinforcement learning engineering. He previously served as VP of Engineering at Google Cloud, leading AI data initiatives, and was an assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.
Interestingly, Henry Shi, who was the first to point out this trend on X, is the former CTO of Super.com and is now at Anthropic. When he was engaging with users in the comments, he drew a response from Thariq, a Claude Code engineer who has been active on X for a long time.
Something strange is happening in tech.
CTOs of billion dollar companies are quitting to take IC roles at Anthropic.
Workday CTO -> MTS (Mar 2026)
You[.]com CTO -> MTS (Mar 2026)
Instagram CTO -> MTS (Jan 2026)
Box CTO -> MTS (Dec 2025)
Super[.]com CTO -> MTS (July 2025)
Adept…— Henry Shi (@henrythe9ths) April 28, 2026
The Philosophy Behind the MTS Title: Deliberately Ambiguous Class Labels
These former CTOs received only one title at Anthropic: Member of Technical Staff (MTS). MTS is the standard engineering title shared by Anthropic and OpenAI, used across all domains—research, infrastructure, safety, product engineering—regardless of seniority level.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman has publicly explained that the lab deliberately avoids categorizing employees as “researchers” or “engineers,” and the MTS title reflects this philosophy of a flattened technical organization. The salary range for MTS roles is also quite broad: Anthropic’s MTS base salary ranges from approximately $300,000 to $405,000 USD (approximately NT$9.75 million to NT$13.15 million), while OpenAI ranges from $210,000 to $530,000 USD (approximately NT$6.83 million to NT$17.22 million). With equity compensation, senior MTS total compensation can easily exceed seven figures in USD.
This intentionally vague title design is itself a competitive advantage. When competitors see “Member of Technical Staff” on LinkedIn, they have no way to tell whether this person is leading a large team, driving critical systems, or setting the entire research agenda. Anthropic’s flat structure ensures that what these top talents are actually doing remains unknown to the outside world.
Summoning AGI, or more efficient personal leverage?
This wave of CTO demotions has sparked heated debates online. One camp argues that tech elites are being called by a sense of mission toward AGI, choosing to return to the core of technology. But more voices believe things are far more complicated than “idealism.” There are also internet users who point out that these successful CTOs aren’t fools—they wouldn’t give up tens of millions in annual salary for a vague mission. The real reason, they say, is that these CTOs discovered the secret of the AI era: the closer you are to the model, the more power you have.
In traditional tech company logic, a CTO’s power comes from “scale”: navigating company politics, paying down technical debt, maintaining legacy systems—half their energy goes to managing people. But at a lab like Anthropic, one top engineer plus a powerful model can accomplish what once took a hundred-person team. This is a fundamental inversion of power structures. In the past, the more people you managed, the more influence you had; now, the more model capability you can leverage, the more influence you have.
Anthropic’s Remarkable Growth: Valuation Projected to Reach $90 Billion
Behind this talent magnetism effect is Anthropic’s staggering growth rate. Anthropic is in talks with investors for a new funding round, targeting a valuation of up to $850 billion to $900 billion, with an expected fundraising size of $40 billion to $50 billion. If the deal goes through, Anthropic would surpass its competitor OpenAI (currently valued at approximately $852 billion), becoming the world’s most valuable AI startup.
Anthropic just completed a funding round at a $380 billion valuation in February, and in just over two months, its valuation has more than doubled. The company announced that its annualized revenue has broken through $30 billion, representing explosive growth of more than three times compared to roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025, and is now approaching $40 billion in annualized revenue. A significant portion of this comes from AI code development capabilities, particularly Claude Code and Claude for Work platforms. Anthropic expects to potentially launch its IPO as early as October this year.
In Summary: The Career Ladder Is Being Redefined by AI
This talent exodus sends a strong signal: the AI era is fundamentally reshaping the definition of “influence.” In the past, everyone’s ultimate goal was to become a CTO or CEO; today, the brightest minds are flooding into frontier labs, choosing to be individual contributors. Becoming a “super individual” who can directly manipulate foundation models is far more powerful and free than being an executive managing hundreds of people.
Perhaps as netizens have put it, this isn’t some calling of destiny, but rather the smartest minds of our era are voting with their feet, heading toward the places with the greatest leverage.
Source: KOCPC Chinese