OpenAI is to expand its London research centre to become its largest hub outside the United States, setting the stage for an intensified battle with Google DeepMind for top artificial intelligence talent in the UK capital.

The developer of ChatGPT said it would significantly increase the size of its London operation, which currently employs around 30 researchers, although it stopped short of disclosing specific headcount targets or investment figures. The move represents a strategic deepening of its UK presence at a time when competition for elite AI engineers has become one of the fiercest recruitment wars in global technology.

OpenAI, whose European headquarters remain in Dublin, said London offered a “unique concentration of world-class talent across machine learning and the sciences” alongside a strong culture of interdisciplinary collaboration.

The expansion is widely seen as a direct challenge to DeepMind, which employs about 2,000 staff in the UK and has long dominated Britain’s AI research ecosystem.

Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer, acknowledged that the company had already recruited staff from DeepMind and expected to continue doing so. He said OpenAI’s appeal lay partly in its culture.

“We are famously a bottom-up lab,” Chen said. “We let researchers pursue their lines of research and turn those into company-level bets.” By contrast, he suggested, Google’s approach could be “slightly more top-down”.

The contest for AI talent has driven compensation to extraordinary levels. Senior engineers at major AI labs can command packages worth well over £1m, often made up of salary, bonuses and equity. In the United States, reports have emerged of multi-million-dollar offers as firms scramble to secure leading researchers.

As a private company, OpenAI can offer equity stakes that may rise significantly in value if the firm eventually lists publicly. It has also facilitated secondary share sales, allowing employees to monetise part of their holdings — creating a powerful recruitment incentive.

Chen said compensation would remain “very competitive”, adding: “AI talent is very valuable and we need to be competitive everywhere.”

The expansion was welcomed by UK political leaders eager to position Britain as a global AI powerhouse.

Technology secretary Liz Kendall described the move as “a huge vote of confidence in the UK’s world-leading position at the cutting edge of AI research”.

London mayor Sadiq Khan said he was “delighted that OpenAI is anchoring its major new research hub here”, arguing that the capital’s academic institutions and tech ecosystem made it a natural home for the next wave of AI innovation.

The announcement comes as the UK government seeks to attract high-growth technology firms as part of its broader economic strategy, positioning AI as a central driver of productivity and competitiveness.

OpenAI’s expansion follows internal warnings from its chief executive, Sam Altman, that the company faced mounting competition from rivals including Google and Anthropic. Altman has previously described the race in advanced AI development as a “code red” moment for the firm.

Chen said recent advances in so-called AI agents — autonomous software capable of executing tasks with limited supervision — marked a significant inflection point for the industry.

“Something is happening in AI that feels like a step change,” he said. “We’ve reached a level where we can rely on agents and use them in real-world workflows.”

He described how researchers can now delegate experiment execution to AI systems, returning to interpret results and refine hypotheses. This, he suggested, would increasingly reshape not only research roles but also broader “analyst-style” professions.

However, Chen cautioned that such systems remain dependent on human oversight and design. “Agents cannot ideate and come up with the experimental design itself,” he said.

As AI capabilities accelerate, public anxiety about job displacement and social impact has grown. Recent essays questioning the pace and implications of AI development have circulated widely, contributing to volatility in technology markets.

Chen acknowledged that “external perception of AI has shifted in a more negative direction” but argued that many practical applications — particularly in productivity and research — remain underappreciated.

“There are many positive uses of agents,” he said. “That’s something we as an industry need to underscore.”

With OpenAI committing to scale up in London, the capital is poised to become an even more intense battleground in the global race to dominate advanced AI — with research talent, equity incentives and cultural positioning now as important as computing power itself.