A number of already-wealthy, already-accomplished tech figures are returning to hands-on operating or engineering roles, driven by a fear of missing what they see as the defining moment of the AI era and the prospect of even greater financial rewards. The trend spans people rejoining others' companies in junior-sounding technical positions as well as veteran founders launching new AI ventures of their own, suggesting that AI's perceived scale of opportunity is drawing back people who had already stepped away from day-to-day work.

Examples include Tom Blomfield, co-founder of GoCardless and Monzo, who is taking leave from Y Combinator to join Anthropic's compute team as a "member of technical staff" — the same deliberately non-hierarchical title used by Andrej Karpathy, who joined Anthropic's pre-training team in May, and by Peter Bailis, who left his role as Workday's CTO for Anthropic after less than a year. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger became Anthropic's Chief Product Officer in 2024. Others are building their own companies: Chamath Palihapitiya has taken his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, an enterprise AI coding startup that raised a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures, while former Opendoor chief executive Eric Wu has launched NavigateAI, an AI "copilot" for construction workers, backed by $25 million in seed funding.