The company – which set up a UK office in 2023 – says it will expand its London-based research team, bringing in emerging talent from leading British universities. It has not said how many researchers it will hire.
“The UK brings together world-class talent and leading scientific institutions and universities, making it an ideal place to deliver critical research that will ensure our AI is safe, useful and benefits everyone,” Mark Chen, chief research officer at OpenAI, said in a statement.
The plans bring OpenAI into direct competition for top research talent with Google DeepMind, the AI lab run by British researcher Demis Hassabis, which is headquartered in London. DeepMind has a long-standing partnership with the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, where it sponsors professorships, funds research and works with researchers.
At the University of Oxford’s latest career fair, the floor was packed with graduate students looking for technical roles and recruiters for AI-related positions. “Even within a year, demand and supply are moving both ways,” says Jonathan Black, director of careers services at the University of Oxford. “Having something like this is a really positive sign.”
The company says OpenAI’s team in London will continue to contribute to products like Codex and GPT-5.2, but will now “own” certain aspects of model development related to security, reliability, and performance evaluation.
In a statement, Liz Kendall, the UK’s Science and Technology Secretary, described the announcement as “a huge vote of confidence in the UK’s world-leading position in AI research”.
The announcement coincides with a push among AI companies in the UK, including OpenAI, to ramp up the country’s data center and power infrastructure to meet the huge demand for compute.
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