Each employee costs $100,000 per month: Anthropic’s astronomical staffing expenses, the AI giant behind Claude

Artificial intelligence is causing a spike in salaries in the United States. Certain trades such as electricians who work to build data centers sometimes have salaries worthy of Wall Street traders. But within the giant Anthropic, known for its AI Claude, it is yet another dimension.

Within OpenAI's main competitor, which is preparing to go public, each employee costs as much as a professional football player, or more than $100,000... per month.

The American start-up behind artificial intelligence Claude unveiled its financial results for the third quarter of 2026 on Monday, November 2, as its IPO approaches. And according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Anthropic spent $1.711 billion on personnel expenses between July and September 2026. Reported to the approximately 5.

300 employees employed by the company as of September 30, this amount represents $322,830 per person over three months, or $107,610 per month.

However, this is not the average salary of Anthropic employees. This figure includes all personnel expenses, including share-based compensation. It is also based on the numbers observed at the end of the quarter, and not on their average over the three months.

More than 40,000 dollars per month per employee, even without shares. Most of these expenses can be explained by share-based compensation, which is very widespread in American technology companies. In the third quarter, Anthropic recorded approximately $1.070 billion in expenses related to these remunerations, or nearly 63% of its personnel expenses.

Subtracting this sum from the $1.711 billion in total expenses leaves $641 million devoted to compensation and other non-stock personnel costs. Compared to the company's 5,300 employees, this represents around 40.

300 dollars per month per employee, or nearly 484,000 dollars per year. This amount includes in particular fixed salaries, bonuses, employer contributions and social benefits.

It therefore does not correspond to the salary actually received by employees. But given its level, we can imagine that the average net remuneration of Anthropic employees reaches several tens of thousands of dollars per month. These amounts demonstrate Anthropic’s exceptional growth.

Over the first nine months of 2026, the start-up devoted 4.863 billion dollars to its personnel expenses, compared to 1.027 billion over the same period of 2025. An increase of 374% in just one year. The progression is even more spectacular when we go back a few years.

Machine-translated from French