OpenAI's London operation spent an average of £2.3 million per employee on salary and equity in 2025, according to company accounts reported by the Guardian. OpenAI UK Ltd employed 110 people who collectively received £87 million in salaries and £168 million in shares. The arithmetic produces an average package of £2,318,181, but the report cautions that compensation varied widely and that the largest awards were concentrated among researchers building frontier AI models.

The figures show how expensive the competition for scarce machine-learning talent became during 2025. The reported average package was more than double the £1.1 million recorded in the previous year. The Guardian compared the new figure with UK earnings data from the Office for National Statistics and found it amounted to 58 times the median compensation of a full-time UK employee. OpenAI declined to comment on the accounts.

An uneven balance scale contrasts a few large equity blocks with many smaller compensation tiles.
The reported figure is an average, and the source says awards differed substantially between the highest- and lowest-paid employees.

London is strategically important to the company because it is OpenAI's largest international research hub, according to the report. The office also contains government-affairs, sales and marketing teams, so the employee population is not made up exclusively of model researchers. OpenAI UK is based in Westminster and is preparing a new headquarters in King's Cross, an area that also hosts Google DeepMind and has become a major center for AI research.

The average should not be read as a typical paycheck. A relatively small number of large equity awards can pull a mean far above what most employees receive, and the Guardian reported a substantial gap between the highest- and lowest-paid staff. The accounts combine £87 million of salaries with £168 million of shares, meaning equity represented the larger portion of the disclosed compensation pool. The report did not provide a median package or a role-by-role breakdown.

An abstract London AI hub expands across research, policy and enterprise-sales layers.
OpenAI's London base combines its largest international research hub with government-affairs and commercial teams.

OpenAI's UK business also expanded rapidly. The subsidiary reported 2025 turnover of £293 million, more than three times the previous level, and profit of £20.3 million. Its London teams include staff who sell licenses to companies and organizations as well as researchers and policy personnel. Former UK chancellor George Osborne joined in December as the company's head for countries, the Guardian reported.

The compensation data offers a concrete measure of the AI industry's talent contest. During the period covered by the accounts, rival Meta was reported to be offering some researchers multi-year packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars. OpenAI's London filing does not reveal individual awards, and it cannot show how much of the equity will ultimately be realized. What it does show is that frontier-model competition is being financed not only through chips and data centers, but through unusually large commitments to the people companies believe can advance the technology.