OpenAI hires Wall Street bankers to build finance AI
OpenAI is recruiting over 100 investment bankers from leading Wall Street firms to train AI models that automate traditional finance work, cementing the sector as the primary battleground for enterprise AI adoption.
OpenAI has hired more than 100 former investment bankers from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. Rather than executing traditional finance roles, these recruits are tasked with training AI models to handle financial modeling and automate work historically done by junior staff. The hiring push includes both junior analysts and senior veterans, such as former Morgan Stanley managing director Alisha Lehr who joined last month.
The talent grab underscores a complex paradox for Wall Street. OpenAI just closed a $7 billion share sale and is eyeing a potential trillion-dollar initial public offering as soon as the second half of 2026. Goldman Sachs is serving as an underwriter for that offering, meaning the bank is effectively supplying talent to a company building technology that threatens its own workforce.
The dynamic highlights a broader shift in how top tech talent views traditional finance. Speaking recently at the Internapalooza Conference, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman recalled turning down a Goldman internship in college after being "peer pressured and kind of tricked" into applying. He characterized banking as inherently hierarchical, criticizing an industry where people "put too much effort into trying to get taken seriously" rather than creating new products.
Altman argued that AI has permanently lowered the barriers to building a company, noting entrepreneurs can now succeed without traditional corporate validation. This ethos dictates OpenAI’s internal operations. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar stated in June that basic AI proficiency is now a non-negotiable skill for new finance hires. "I would never hire a finance person who didn’t know how to use Excel, and I probably wouldn’t hire a finance person today that doesn’t know how to use a tool like Codex," she said.
The aggressive poaching of banking staff highlights how finance has become the primary testing ground for enterprise AI deployment. Anthropic recently entered the fray by launching roughly 10 pre-built AI agents tailored for financial workflows, including underwriting, credit memos and earnings analysis. With Anthropic's Claude already in production at JPMorgan, Goldman and Citi, the race to automate the investment banking hierarchy is accelerating across the industry.
