Accounts for OpenAI UK Ltd, which is based in Westminster but is opening a new HQ in London’s King’s Cross area, showed that 110 staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares in the company, which is aiming to list on the stock market at a valuation of about $1tn.

The earnings amount to 58 times the median UK full-time employee earnings, according to the Office for National Statistics. An OpenAI worker on an average package could expect to take home about £1,000 an hour in salary and equity before tax.

But there is understood to be a wide discrepancy between the highest and lowest earners. The biggest compensation packages are reserved for AI researchers who help build the San Francisco company’s cutting-edge models such as Astra.

The figures relate to 2025, when there was a talent war and OpenAI’s rival, Meta, was reported to be offering multi-year packages running into several hundred million dollars.

OpenAI’s London base reflects the UK capital’s status as an important hub for AI talent with some of the brightest machine-learning experts and AI researchers coming out of universities such as Cambridge.