People are leaving Stripe for "weird" OpenAI rival with big hiring plans
AI has overtaken fintech as the new hot technology field and, as a result, staff in the former are being tempted to join the latter. Stripe employees were historically some of the most coveted and well-paid people in fintech, but in the past year at least 70 have left for OpenAI. But Stripe defectors have an alternative: one of the AI firm's direct competitors has got its own collection of Stripe alumni, and has just hired another ex-Stripe employee to lead its European arm.
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Guillaume Princen has joined Anthropic in Paris as its head of EMEA. Princen spent seven years at Stripe as its head of Europe and Middle East, but left in 2021 and was most recently CEO of spend management fintech Mooncard. Alongside his appointment, the company announced plans to hire 100 people in the region. Princen appears to be Anthropic's first France-based employee, but it has ~50 people in London, including Cyprien de Masson d'Autume, an ex-SocGen engineer and Google DeepMind researcher who joined as a member of technical staff in January.
Anthropic created Claude, its ChatGPT equivalent known for its excellence at AI based coding. Based in San Francisco, the firm has been hiring massively; it had ~240 employees in 2023 and grew to over 1,000 as of last September. Reviews on forum Blind say that, "since everyone is relatively new, there's no real sense of hierarchy," but with that comes "a certain weirdness that makes it fun to clock into work."
Anthropic has more than 100 Stripe alums working there already, roughly 10% of total headcount; only Google appears to have lost more employees to the firm. Other senior hires from the fintech this year include San Francisco-based Amanda Donohue, formerly Stripe's head of people programs and development, who joined in February.
Anthropic has even been hiring Stripe's recruiters. In 2025, it has hired Meah Gorokov, Liz Speight and Lynda Galliano, who spent a combined 17 years recruiting for Stripe. Daniela Amodei, Anthropic's president and co-founder, spent five years at Stripe, beginning in its recruiting team (before leaving for OpenAI in 2018).
What do Stripe people do at AI firms? OpenAI employees we've spoken to say Stripe's technical staff predominantly sit on the 'applied' product side, divided from the 'research' side. Anthropic staff say they instead appreciate a "very strong company culture of speaking up, questioning norms, getting and giving feedback."
Blind reviews say people at Anthropic staff "usually work overtime because of passion, not because of pressure."
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