Australian engineer Andrew Tulloch joined Meta last year after founding Thinking Machines Lab with OpenAI’s former CTO. He starts at Anthropic next week.
Key Takeaways
- Andrew Tulloch, an Australian engineer who is one of the world’s most sought-after AI specialists, has joined Anthropic.
- Tulloch was reportedly offered a package that could have hit US$1.5 billion by Meta last year, epitomising the huge premium AI talent is fetching in Silicon Valley.
- Tulloch grew up in Perth and studied at the University of Sydney before moving to the US in 2012 to join Meta, then known as Facebook, and later OpenAI in 2023.
- He will work on Anthropic’s inference and performance team, a source said, which focuses on how efficiently customers can access models hosted in data centres.
- Tulloch founded Thinking Machines Lab alongside former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati in 2025, a startup that raised a record US$2 billion seed round.
Key background
Australian engineer Andrew Tulloch is not a household name like Sam Altman or Jensen Huang, but he is as close to a rockstar as AI engineers get. A former Facebook executive described him as “definitely an extreme genius.”
Tulloch was one of six who co-founded Thinking Machines Lab, which minted a record US$2 billion seed round last year. Australian VC Square Peg participated in that round, with Tulloch being its Aussie connection.
The move to Anthropic was first reported by Business Insider. A source at the company, granted anonymity because they were not authorised to speak on the matter, told Forbes Australia that Tulloch was starting at the company next week and would be joining its inference and performance team.
Anthropic declined to comment.
It comes as Anthropic heads towards an IPO, which the Journal reports will happen in October at a valuation target near US$2 trillion.
Crucial number
US$1.5 billion. That is the six-year compensation package Meta reportedly offered to Tulloch to lure him away from Thinking Machines Lab. That figure is at the top end and would require ambitious performance and stock metrics to be hit, the Wall Street Journal reported, but it is dazzling nonetheless.
Tulloch knocked that back, but months later did return to Meta.
Global view
As a handful of companies in Silicon Valley run the AI race against each other, they have shown themselves willing to fork out huge compensation packages to secure the talent required to win.
Meta offered a 24-year-old engineer, Mathew Deitke, a US$250 million package over four years. It also reportedly offered researchers US$100 million sign-up bonuses to join its research team.
Acqui-hires have become common too. Meta spent US$14.3 billion for a 49 per cent stake in Scale AI, which led to its founder Alexandr Wang leading the tech giant’s superintelligence unit. Alphabet paid US$2.7 billion to license Character.AI’s tech and bring founder Noam Shazeer into the company. Microsoft pulled a similar US$650 million move to get Mustafa Suleyman as its CEO of Microsoft AI.
Tangent
None of this may matter in a few years, of course. The lead of Anthropic’s alignment team estimated there is a greater than 10 per cent chance that AI kills all humans in the next decade.
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