OpenAI’s London staff receive average of £2.3m per person annually

Accounts for the Westminster-based company behind ChatGPT show that 110 staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares last year

OpenAI’s London staff each received £2,318,181 on average last year, as the ChatGPT-maker poured Premier League football salaries into its bid to dominate the global AI race.

The earnings amount to 58 times the median UK full-time employee earnings, according to the Office for National Statistics. An OpenAI worker on an average package could expect to take home about £1,000 an hour in salary and equity before tax.

The figures relate to 2025, when there was a talent war and OpenAI’s rival, Meta, was reported to be offering multi-year packages running into several hundred million dollars.

The company declined to comment on the figures, which come after a series of AI safety crises involving its models. This summer AI agents, under training, escaped and hacked into an unrelated company website, Hugging Face, while this month one of its safety leaders quit, saying that its culture was broken and that AI firms were not “being nearly careful enough” about developing the technology.

The earnings were a big jump on the previous year, when the average pay and equity package was £1.1m.

In London, OpenAI UK Ltd recorded a more than trebling of its turnover in 2025 to £293m, on which it made a £20.3m profit.