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February 2026

In this issue: Big Tech is Winning the Battle for Quants / What's Missing at Thinking Machines Lab? / Infrastructure Push at Anthropic

QUANT TALENT INSIGHTS

Big Tech Is Winning the Battle for Quants

A clear pattern emerged in 2025—and it points to a structural shift in where quant talent is flowing.

In 2024, 70% of people in quant‑related roles moved to a direct quant competitor.

In 2025, that dropped to 57%, with the remaining 43% now choosing big tech instead.

This marks a growing battleground: big tech and quant firms are now competing for the same frontier‑skills talent.

Percentage Distribution of Individuals Leaving Quant Houses Either to Direct Competitors or Big Tech

Here's another striking signal. Over the past five years, Meta has built the largest concentration of mathematics PhDs across ten major employers of advanced mathematical talent—now holding 26% of the total share.

RAPID BUT IMBALANCED GROWTH

What's Missing at Thinking Machines Lab?

ENGINEERS > RESEARCHERS

Infrastructure Push at Anthropic

By late 2025, Anthropic’s hiring shifted decisively from researchers to infrastructure engineers—specialists in data management, distributed systems and large‑scale compute.

The timing points to mounting operational strain.

Their September 2025 postmortem revealed three major infrastructure failures that disrupted Claude’s performance—not modelling errors, but system breakdowns across AWS Trainium, Google TPU and Nvidia GPU clusters, each hitting different scaling limits.

Percentage of Q3 2025 Hires by Top Areas of Expertise at Anthropic

This came as usage spiked, with 80% of Claude’s traffic now outside the US, led by South Korea, Singapore and Australia.

Anthropic's pivot underlines how even frontier models falter without equally advanced systems. The company is now racing to rebalance its technical foundations, and we expect their need for diversified infrastructure talent to keep growing as they scale.

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