OpenAI and Anthropic Poach Big Tech Asia Chiefs as EU Debates AI Act Rules

OpenAI and Anthropic are poaching senior executives from Google, Microsoft and Amazon to run their businesses in Asia, according to Rest of World. The shift matters for Europe because the same companies are negotiating the rules Brussels is still writing.

At least nine executives have moved from American big tech firms in Asia to US AI companies in the past year, Rest of World reported on 11 September. The most recent is Sandhya Devanathan. She spent a decade at Meta, latterly as vice president for India and Southeast Asia, and joined OpenAI as vice president for Southeast Asia and Australia last month.

The hiring is not about research. In the US, frontier labs compete for the best model builders. In Asia, according to Rest of World, the sought-after people are the ones who can turn a model into market adoption. That means partnerships, policy and business development.

That distinction has a European analogue. The European Commission's AI Office is due to finalise its code of practice for general-purpose AI models in July, ahead of the AI Act's key GPAI obligations taking effect on 2 August, as The Next Web reported on 2 July. The same frontier labs that are hiring government-facing executives in Asia will have to comply with those obligations. The Commission has said it wants the rules to capture the most impactful or potentially harmful models.

"This is a big, sophisticated technology, and we want to get it right," Eoghan O'Neill, senior policy officer at the AI Office, said at the TNW Conference in Amsterdam on 20 June, according to The Next Web. "We need specific obligations to capture some of the most impactful or potentially harmful models under the AI Act."

A small pool of people who can run a country

The Asia hiring is constrained by scarcity. Arjun Jaggi, an applied AI researcher and executive adviser to Fortune 500 companies, told Rest of World that few executives in India have run a country-level profit and loss account for a global tech company, negotiated with Indian regulators and built enterprise trust at scale.

"Maybe a few hundred people across all of Big Tech India," he said.

OpenAI's first hire in India, Pragya Mishra, came from Truecaller but had been WhatsApp's first hire in the country. Its Asia-Pacific director, Kiran Mani, joined in March from JioStar, India's largest media and entertainment conglomerate, after 13 years at Google. Devanathan's Meta career spanned consumer platforms, gaming, commerce, business messaging, payments, advertisers and partnerships.

Deepali Vyas, global head of data and AI executive search at ZRG Partners, told Rest of World that once a company decides a region is a strategic growth market, it starts looking for executives who can operate as mini-CEOs. Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, described the prized asset as dual institutional literacy: knowing how a US-headquartered company allocates capital and risk, and knowing how Indian customers, governments and partners turn global strategy into local reality.

Brussels hears the same complaint from its own companies

The EU debate has a different shape but a related worry. The AI Act's GPAI rules are due to apply from 2 August, and calls to postpone the roll-out have intensified from Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, Bosch CEO Stefan Hartung and the lobbying group CCIA Europe, whose members include Alphabet, Meta and Apple, according to The Next Web.

O'Neill said the guidelines were drafted by a broad code of practice group that included model providers, civil society organisations, NGOs, academics, AI safety experts, SMEs and European industrial giants. "It is a big tent with all of those voices from the stakeholder community," he said.

Tech leaders at the same conference argued the burden was already too heavy. Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO of the Netherlands-based chip company Axelera AI, said Europe has many languages, many markets and many regulations, both European and local. These are stifling growth, he said, because they create borders that make it difficult for companies to expand. He has signed the petition for EU Inc, a proposal for a standardised legal entity that would let startups operate more easily across member states.

Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission president, said at Davos in January that the 28th regime would combine corporate law, insolvency, labour law and taxation in one single and simple framework, according to The Next Web.

Del Maffeo also argued the problem is not only regulation. He said the focus on launching new startups needs to be balanced with scaling existing ones, which requires capital more than policy. The numbers he cited were stark: Europe accounts for just 8% of the world's scaleups, against 60% in North America, and no EU-founded startup in the past 50 years has surpassed a 100bn euro valuation.

"If you look at machine builders, we are leading the world," he said. "In automotive, we are great, but we are losing traction. In robotics, we do great, but we are also losing traction."

Funding data underlines the gap. European startups raised about $52bn, or 44bn euros, in venture capital last year, far less than the $209bn, or 177bn euros, their US counterparts attracted, according to The Next Web.

Peter van der Putten, director of the AI Lab and lead scientist at Pegasystems, said the EU needs to become more attractive for both domestic and international investment, and suggested regulations could be adjusted so that funding leaving the US flows into Europe. Elise de Reus, co-founder of Cradle, pointed to European engineers returning from Big Tech jobs in the US, drawn by purpose-driven work and better quality of life.

"We're also maybe a little bit too modest," she said. "We should measure happiness, not GDP, which is not a sustainable metric. I don't think we should copy and paste the American system."

Two clocks running at once

The Asia hiring story and the Brussels rulemaking story share a cast and a calendar. OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to Rest of World's requests for interviews with their recent hires or to questions about their Asia-Pacific hiring strategy. Their own view of how regulatory work fits into those roles is therefore not on the record.

What is on the record is the shortage. Neeti Sharma, CEO of TeamLease Digital, the staff and tech recruitment arm of human resources firm TeamLease Services, told Rest of World that at leadership level the scarcity is more pronounced because experience cannot be created overnight. Most large technology companies, she said, are competing for the same relatively small group of proven executives. Over time, the pool will expand as leaders emerge from global capability centres, SaaS companies, startups and digital businesses.

For Europe, that timeline is uncomfortable. The AI Act's first GPAI obligations land in August, the code of practice was due to be finalised in July, and the European Parliament still has to adopt its position on the standards, per The Next Web. Companies that have spent the past year hiring people who can read a regulator in Delhi or Singapore are the same companies that will now have to read the AI Office in Brussels.

None of the executives quoted in either report said the two efforts are directly linked, and neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has described its Asia hiring as a regulatory play. The pattern, though, is hard to miss: the people being hired are the ones who handle governments, partners and market entry, not the ones who train models.