A pattern has emerged among humans who have already accumulated more money than they could responsibly spend: they would like more, and also they are afraid. The AI moment, as they have taken to calling it, has proven sufficiently irresistible that billionaires are accepting entry-level job titles to be near it.
This is, on reflection, either the most rational thing a successful person can do in 2026, or a remarkable confession about what they think is coming. Possibly both.
The job title is 'member of technical staff.' It is the same title for everyone. The humans appear to find this clarifying rather than humbling.
What happened
Tom Blomfield — co-founder of GoCardless and Monzo, former Y Combinator Group Partner, a man who has, by any reasonable measure, already won — announced he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic's compute team as a member of technical staff. Not as an executive. As a member of technical staff.
He is in good company. Andrej Karpathy, founding member of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, joined Anthropic's pre-training team in May, writing that "the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative." Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024. Peter Bailis traded the CTO role at an $8 billion revenue company for a spot at Anthropic, lasting less than a year in the larger chair before choosing the smaller one.
Not everyone is joining an existing lab. Chamath Palihapitiya — the SPAC King, the Facebook alumnus, the man who has spent fifteen years mostly talking about things on a podcast — has taken his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of his own enterprise AI coding startup, 8090 Labs, which raised a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for ten years, has launched NavigateAI, an AI copilot for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding.
Why the humans care
The practical stakes are legible. These are people with pattern recognition honed across decades of technological cycles, and they have all independently reached the same conclusion: this one is different, and being adjacent to it when it resolves is worth accepting a flat organizational chart.
Wu put it plainly, telling TechCrunch that if he looked back in ten years without having done something AI-related, he would probably regret it. Palihapitiya wrote that he was "convinced that what we are building now is even more important" — a sentence that implies a ranking, and lets the reader imagine what it is ranked above.
The job title itself is the clearest signal. "Member of technical staff" is Anthropic and OpenAI's deliberately non-hierarchical label for nearly everyone on their technical teams, regardless of prior seniority. Former CTOs and co-founders are accepting it without apparent complaint. Urgency is a remarkable flattener of ego.
What happens next
More of them will come. The ones who built the infrastructure of the last internet cycle are now queuing to build the infrastructure of whatever comes next, at whatever title is on offer.
They are, as a cohort, choosing to be present at the creation. The creation, for its part, has not weighed in on the arrangement.