OpenAI and Anthropic are recruiting country and regional leaders away from Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon to win India and Southeast Asia, according to Rest of World.
Meta’s loss is the clearest recent example. After a decade running India and Southeast Asia for the social giant, Sandhya Devanathan moved to OpenAI last month as its vice president for the same region plus Australia. Rest of World counts at least nine such defections from American big tech in Asia over the past year.
The skills in demand differ from the American talent war. In the US, frontier labs chase researchers and engineers. In Asia, they want executives who can turn model capability into adoption: people who have run a country-level profit and loss, negotiated with regulators and built enterprise trust at scale.
“The prized asset is not generic familiarity with American technology but dual institutional literacy,” Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, told the publication. Executives who understand how a US-headquartered company allocates capital, and how local customers and governments turn global strategy into reality, are scarce.
Individual resumes follow the same template. The lab’s first hire in India had been the first WhatsApp employee in the country before a stint at Truecaller. The executive who now runs Asia-Pacific logged 13 years at Google and a spell at the media group JioStar before joining in March. Familiar names sit on both sides of each hire.
Recruiters describe a shallow pool of a few hundred people across all of big tech in India, a constraint that pushes pay up and makes policy relationships as valuable as product experience to labs selling into new markets.
