Don’t be fooled by the talk of artificial intelligence outsmarting humans. AI is all about real-life people and we are in the middle of a full-blown war for their brains.

In the largest-ever poaching effort in corporate history, stories are circulating that Mark Zuckerberg is dishing out football-style signing-on bonuses of up to $100 million a head to lure the sharpest AI minds to Meta Platforms. Wired magazine reported that $300 million over four years was on offer.

“The market’s hot; it’s not that hot,” is how Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer at Meta, dismissed it. Instead, he insisted, there are a “small number of leadership roles” that command a premium and might make a $100 million package.

Semantics, some might say, but if the exact number of zeroes on offer is unclear, the skyward trend is not.

AI talent is becoming exceptionally wealthy. Just look at Big Tech’s major “acquihires”: companies acquired for their employees as much as their business model.

For $15 billion in June, Meta purchased 49 per cent of Scale AI and brought the artificial intelligence firm’s co-founder, Alexandr Wang, on board to lead its AI efforts. For $650 million in 2024, Microsoft licensed Inflection AI’s core technology and took many of its staff, including Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google DeepMind.

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Valuable shares that are granted to staff usually mature, or “vest”, over years; in the wild world of AI, this has dropped to months.

The handful of scientists who decided to study machine learning and ended up working on large language models have won the lottery: they are rare and in demand. The leaders of frontier AI businesses form a tight, complex web. OpenAI has spawned several ventures, including the Amodei siblings’ Anthropic and Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence.

Granted, Big Tech has always paid big money, but these latest stories are putting the wind up those working in the sector, creating the haves and the have-nots. Or the have-lesses. Resources and talent are being further consolidated in the hands of the few. Just as people in high‑demand roles in areas such as AI, data science and cybersecurity command large premiums, there is enormous polarisation with those who don’t.

As more money is thrown at developing AI at the top, the fear is over what is happening to jobs at the lower end of the spectrum.

Some of this is related to artificial intelligence and tech bosses are vocal about AI’s fabulous applications for coding. Marc Benioff, of Salesforce, is the latest to trumpet the joys of AI-driven productivity, meaning that he needs fewer software engineers.

On Blind, the platform where tech workers share experiences, developers complain of living in 2023, with fewer approaches from recruiters, tougher hiring processes and less tolerance of remote working. For workers over 40, AI “is looking like an extinction-level event”, one US Reddit user said. Fresh-faced graduates are finding that there is less need for their services.

It is no wonder they are wary. In the past few years there has been a bloodbath of jobs in tech. In 2023, in the aftermath of Covid, more than 250,000 tech jobs went, according to the Layoffs.fyi tracker. In 2024 152,922 jobs were cut and so far this year there have been 72,808, so on track to be about the same. Microsoft has just announced another 9,000 layoffs, adding to the 6,000 cut in May.

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In the UK, job vacancies have been shrinking at their fastest rate in four years, according to a survey by KPMG and the Recruitment & Employment Confederation in January and the steepest declines are hitting IT and computing.

But tech is a broad church and other indicators are more positive. Numbers from the job platform Adzuna show that the average UK tech salary in 2025 bounced to more than £59,000 from £55,500 the year before. European tech workers remain far cheaper than their US counterparts and they are in demand: data from the recruitment firm Hays showed that 74 per cent of British tech employers planned to increase salaries in the next 12 months.

Nonetheless, amid uncertainty over the impact of AI, the tech jobs market is mixed and sentiment is grim. There is a lingering unease about what is happening in the industry: an anxious undercurrent that is hard to ignore.