The AI talent war in Asia is about regulators and distribution, not model researchers

OpenAI and Anthropic are poaching senior Asia executives from Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Rest of World counted at least nine such moves to US AI labs in the past year. Meta’s former India and Southeast Asia VP Sandhya Devanathan, for example, has joined OpenAI to run Southeast Asia and Australia.

What is scarce here is not ML knowledge. It is executives who have run a country-level P&L, dealt with Indian or Southeast Asian regulators, built government relationships and persuaded large enterprises to adopt unfamiliar technology. One recruiter describes them effectively as “mini-CEOs” for each market.

Once frontier models become sufficiently comparable, an important competitive advantage shifts from research talent toward distribution, policy access and trusted local relationships.