AI Talent Exodus, Half of xAI Co-founders Depart

The movement of key personnel in artificial intelligence (AI) platform companies has escalated into debates over monetization methods and safety policies. Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba, co-founders of xAI, will leave the company in February 2026, marking the departure of half of the original 12 co-founders. Elon Musk explained that xAI has been reorganized to increase its execution speed. Following the announcement of its merger with SpaceX, many engineers publicly resigned. This talent movement is not limited to a specific company; according to a report by SignalFire, the retention rate for second-year employees at Anthropic is 80%, while Google DeepMind stands at 78%, and OpenAI at 67%. Anthropic is absorbing talent from both OpenAI and DeepMind, and the competition among frontier AI labs is shifting from the speed of model releases to the retention and recruitment of researchers. The 2026 report indicates that hiring by large tech companies is down 25% compared to 2019, and new hiring by early-stage startups has also decreased by 76%. While the movement of talent in AI platforms does not directly explain corporate value or market share, large AI research institutes are growing into commercial organizations, while startups are transforming into smaller entities.

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