Estimated employee counts across ten frontier model builders. The split is stark: the leading US labs run five-figure-adjacent teams, while China's open-weight champions — DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax — ship rival models with a few hundred people. For Google and Meta, only the dedicated AI division is counted, not the parent company.
None of these are official. Every company here is private or reports headcount loosely, so figures are mid-2026 estimates triangulated from workforce-intelligence trackers (Revelio Labs, PitchBook, Tracxn), Wikipedia, and press reporting. Counts vary by source mainly over whether contractors and data-annotation staff are included.
Google & Meta show AI divisions only. Google = Google DeepMind (~2.5K core researchers inside a broader ~6K org); Meta = Superintelligence Labs (FAIR + TBD Lab + product-AI), not Meta's ~70K+ total staff.
xAI is not pure AI. Its headcount folds in X (formerly Twitter) staff after the Feb 2026 SpaceX merger, so it overstates model-team size. OpenAI spans a wide range — FT pegged core staff near 4,500 against a ~7.8K broad count, with a stated target of 8,000 by end of 2026.
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