AI Giant Interns' Daily Salary Revealed: Anthropic Exceeds $5000, While Kimi Can Only Make It to the Fourth Tier

Original Title: "AI Giant Intern Daily Salary Revealed: Anthropic Exceeds ¥5000, Kimi Only Ranks in Fourth Tier"
Original Author: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily

In 2026, the "basic" internship wage for domestic university students is, a median monthly salary of ¥5000, which can reach ¥10,000 for a technical position in a first-tier city.

Having embraced the advantages of the era and accepted my professional misjudgment, I wasn't too bitter initially, until I came across—

an intern at a certain AI company, earning over ¥5000 a day... in a day? 5000?

It's too painful. I casually collected the daily salaries of interns from 12 global AI giants, from OpenAI and Anthropic to ByteDance and DeepSeek, from official career pages to websites like levels.fyi and Glassdoor

and cross-verified them with employee disclosures on domestic social media.

I found out that such high salaries are not unique to just one company. I can only say: the AI industry's talent war has already entered a feverish stage.

Next, I mixed and ranked AI behemoths from home and abroad, classifying them from super popular to less popular (there's no "trash" tier in this ranking), which might completely change your impression of the term "intern".

Ceiling: This isn't just an internship, it's an esteemed AI researcher

First, let's look at the top two "divine positions," with daily salaries both surpassing the ¥5000 mark.

First Place, OpenAI Residency, with a daily salary of around ¥5625.

A monthly salary of $18,333, equivalent to over ¥120,000. As stated on the OpenAI official website, multilingual pages confirm this without a doubt.

This is a 6-month full-time research program, where participants are directly assigned to core teams working on large-scale models, reinforcement learning, alignment, safety, and collaborate with full-time researchers. After completing the project, participants can transition to a full-time role.

In simple terms, this is OpenAI's "young genius reserve," nurturing the future backbone of the AI field, shining brightly for the AGI cause. In terms of the work environment, participants work directly at OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters, are required to be present at least 3 days a week, and receive remuneration almost equivalent to that of internal OpenAI researchers.

Of course, such researchers are the cream of the crop. OpenAI recently launched a short-term "Safety Fellows" training program similar to Anthropic's top internship program, which is set to run from September 14, 2026, to February 5, 2027.

In second place, Anthropic AI Safety Fellows, with a daily salary of approximately $5,198.

A weekly salary of $3,850, as clearly stated on the Anthropic website and in their official alignment blog, is the most reliable data point in this research.

A 4-month project, working 40 hours per week. In addition to the salary, each person is provided with an additional $15,000 in computational power funding per month—yes, you read that right, computational power funding, $15,000 per month to use however you please. This can also be considered a special benefit of working in the AI industry, achieving a phased realization of "Token Freedom."

What is the level of the first batch of students? Over 80% have published papers, and over 40% have transitioned directly to full-time positions. The most outrageous part is the salary increase: the first batch in 2024 had a weekly salary of only $2,100, and in 2026, it directly jumped to $3,850, a more than 80% increase in two years. The scarcity of true AI talent can be understood from this salary hike.

These two positions have a common characteristic: extremely high entry barriers, very limited slots, fundamentally a form of "pre-recruitment"—under the guise of interns, they are capturing the future top researchers.

Breaking News: American Tech Interns Earn Weekly Salaries Higher Than Average Monthly Incomes

After discussing the top tier, let's take a look at the regular interns at American tech companies. Note, these are "regular" interns, not part of any special talent program.

Meta, with a daily salary of approximately $3,780. An hourly wage of $70, confirmed by both levels.fyi and Glassdoor, with one reporting $70 and the other $56 to $82 (average $67), showing a consistent range. The official job description states a monthly salary range of $7,188 to $12,134, along with an additional monthly housing subsidy of around $2,600.

Google, with a daily salary of approximately $3,400. An hourly wage of $62.98, equivalent to an annual salary of $92,000 to $122,000 for undergraduate positions, and $113,000 to $150,000 for Ph.D. positions. There are regional differences, with approximately $56.73 per hour in Silicon Valley and around $50 in Seattle.

NVIDIA USA, daily salary of about $2106. This is the average, with an hourly wage of $39, but NVIDIA's official JD has a wide range. For undergraduate SWE, it ranges from $20 to $71, and for PhD research positions, it ranges from $30 to $94—if you are a PhD, the hourly wage ceiling is $94, and the daily salary goes directly above 5000.

OpenAI non-technical internship, daily salary of about $1944. GTM Strategy intern, with an hourly wage of only $36, which is only about 60% of the technical intern's hourly wage, but still belongs to the second tier in the tech field.

Did you notice? Being a regular technical intern at a major U.S. company, the money earned in a week may be more than the monthly salary of many white-collar elites in China.

Creme de la creme: Domestic tech giants catching up, ByteDance offers $2000 a day

After talking about the United States, let's look at China.

Chinese tech giants' investment in top talent has begun to rapidly approach that of U.S. AI giants.

ByteDance Top Seed Research Internship Program, daily salary of $2000.

Yes, you read that right, $2000 a day, which is not too shabby compared to the monthly salary of the "vast majority."

The media reported: "Compared to the internship salary of $500 per day offered by DeepSeek, ByteDance has raised the standard to $2000 per day." This figure was subsequently repeatedly confirmed by more internet media. Calculated based on 20 working days per month, the monthly salary is $40,000.

Who is this program recruiting? Top master's and doctoral students in school. After entering, you can choose your own research topic, have the same rights as regular employees, and the mentor lineup includes Wu Yonghui, Vice President of Research, who just joined from Google DeepMind in February 2025.

Someone put it bluntly: the uniform standard of $500 per day for ByteDance's regular interns, "does not include high-end talent programs such as Cloud Walk, Top Seed, where salaries are generally higher."

Xiaomi Top Internship - Large Model Training Framework, daily salary $500 to $1000; Intelligent Agent Researcher - MiMo, daily salary $1000-1100.

A position posted on a recruitment website, mainly targeting master's students, with job responsibilities including participation in the development of a multi-billion-parameter large-scale model training engine, AI agent research, and more.

By contrast, a regular large-scale model algorithm intern at Xiaomi earns only 300 to 400 yuan per day—a little over half the amount for the same company.

This is the current situation in China's AI industry: Regular positions still follow market rates, but as long as you are a "top talent," money is not an issue.

NPC Level: The "AI Four Little Dragons" with Unlimited Opportunities, Kimi, Zhipu, and Others Are Still Striving

All the above are games for a few top talents. What is the actual salary level for the vast majority of AI interns?

Odaily Star Daily picks a few of the most popular "representative AI companies" to discuss.

DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek), a regular AGI large-scale model intern, earns a daily salary of 500 to 1000 yuan. This figure has been confirmed by many media reports and is also public information on the DeepSeek recruitment platform. Interns from outside the city receive an additional 3000 yuan housing allowance per month. Calculated over 22 days, the monthly salary ranges from 11,000 to 22,000 yuan.

By the way, DeepSeek's formal employees, deep learning researchers, earn a monthly salary of 80,000 to 110,000 yuan, with 14 paychecks, and an annual salary of up to 1.54 million yuan—there is a magnitude of difference between interns and regular employees.

Additionally, the previously circulated "DeepSeek Tsinghua Yao Class intern with a daily pre-tax salary of 5500 yuan" on social media is obviously an extreme case, an outlier. Let's not delve into it further for now; we'll discuss it later.

ByteDance regular R&D/algorithm interns earn a daily salary of 500 yuan. Starting from January 1st this year, ByteDance uniformly set the daily salary for interns in technical and product positions at 500 yuan, claiming to "increase talent investment, enhance salary competitiveness, and improve stock options incentives," to "ensure that employee salary competitiveness and incentive rewards are globally leading and ahead of the industry standard."

Of course, as is the practice in internet giants, they also provide three meals a day, housing subsidies, and some AI positions can go up to 550 yuan.

MiniMax, multi-modal/algorithm interns, earn a daily salary of 350 to over 600 yuan. Technical interns generally earn 350 to 500, while Master interns can earn over 600; operations and non-technical positions only receive 150 to 200. MiniMax has a unique incentive feature for a startup: nearly all employees hold shares, with 385 employees almost all having a stake, so although the cash may not be the highest, the overall benefits may not necessarily be inferior.

Alibaba's Qianwen AI R&D, daily salary of 350 to 550 RMB. Bachelor's degree 350, master's degree 400, plus a monthly 2000 housing allowance; AI Agent development position can reach 450 to 600, AI R&D engineer 500 to 550. For non-local hires, there is also a one-week free accommodation benefit.

NVIDIA China, Deep Learning Architecture/CUDA Intern, daily salary of 400 to 800 RMB. The positions on the recruitment website only offer 250 to 300 for ordinary testing positions.

Kimi (Dark Side of the Moon), Search Recommendation Algorithm/RL Intern position, daily salary of 400 to 450 RMB. The daily salary for product operation positions is between 250 and 350. Although Kimi has been quite successful since the release of K3, expanding externally and receiving significant financing, the internship salary is indeed not high—however, they have prepared a "Time Travel Plan" directly offering options to the top talents of the 27th cohort. In addition, over 90% of the company's open positions have a monthly salary of over 30,000, with an average salary for master's degree holders exceeding 44,000 yuan. The benefits for full-time employees are relatively good.

Xiaomi's Ordinary Large-scale Algorithm Intern, daily salary of 300 to 400 RMB. As mentioned earlier, it is more than twice the "top internship" positions, but considering the current employment environment, it is already considered top-tier.

Zhipu AI, Large-scale Algorithm Framework Intern, daily salary of 200 to 300 RMB. The cash salary is the lowest in this survey. But don't rush to feel sorry—Zhipu employees hold over 51% of the shares, with 452 out of 883 employees having equity. When the market value was 323.2 billion Hong Kong dollars, the core backbone had a net worth of over 100 million, and even ordinary stockholding employees reached millions. Less cash, more options; it depends on whether the interns are willing to wait for the pie.

The Truth About DeepSeek Interns' Daily Salary of 5500 RMB: Don't Treat Geniuses like Turnips

Here, we must specifically discuss the widely circulated DeepSeek 5500 RMB/day.

The story first originated from a tweet on Platform X, where the blogger claimed "Tsinghua Yao Class student revealed DeepSeek offer, internship salary before tax 5500 RMB." Once the news broke, the entire AI community was abuzz with this figure—calculating based on 22 working days, an intern could earn a monthly salary of 120,000, an annual income exceeding 1.3 million, surpassing both OpenAI and Anthropic globally.

However, based on comprehensive information from the internet and media reports, we have concluded that: “DeepSeek Company has not provided official confirmation; this is merely a top-tier special case of treatment rumored within the AI community.”

Therefore, we did not include this special case with a daily salary of 5500 yuan in our ranking, only presenting it as a side note. DeepSeek’s officially stated standard is a daily salary ranging from 500 to 1000 yuan, which is the reliable figure verified through cross-referencing sources.

Yes, there is one more thing worth mentioning separately—In order to prevent the salaries of top-tier interns from being too high and causing an inverse salary curve for senior employees, DeepSeek has implemented a “Senior Employee Scoring System”—the amount new hires can receive is determined by the senior employees’ scores. This also indirectly indicates that high salary exceptions in the AI industry do exist, but they are by no means a common occurrence.

More Truths

After scrutinizing the internship salary data of more than a dozen AI companies, several strong impressions stand out.

First, the salary “wealth gap” in the AI industry is much more severe than imagined. On the same day, in the same industry, some individuals have a daily salary of 5000, while others have 200, a difference of 25 times. The disparity between top talent and ordinary practitioners is truly like night and day.

Second, the salary gap between AI giants in China and the U.S. remains significant. Regular interns at American giants receive a daily salary of around 2000 to nearly 4000 yuan, while those at Chinese giants in regular positions receive 350 to 550, a difference of 6 to 8 times. This difference is influenced by exchange rates and cost of living, but people live real lives, especially young people.

Third, Chinese AI companies are desperately trying to catch up with overseas giants in talent density through “special plans.” Byte Top Seed’s 2000 yuan per day is a clear signal—Chinese companies are willing to offer prices close to those in the U.S. for top talent. However, this only applies to a very small number of individuals, while most positions remain unchanged.

Fourth, cash is only part of the equation; stock options are the real deal. SmartVision has the lowest cash but the highest shareholding ratio, MiniMax has nearly all employees holding shares, and Kimi grants options to retain talent. In the AI industry, where the next multibillion or even trillion-dollar company could emerge at any time, the value of stock options may surpass even a year's salary.

Do you still remember how much your daily wage was during your internship? If it was $200 a day, don't be discouraged. Even interns at Wise Spectrum start at $200, although they may also have multimillion-dollar stock options in their hands. If it was $500, don't be too proud either. The daily wage for a regular intern at Byte is also $500, but the Top Seed Program interns have seen a 4x increase in compensation...

In the AI industry, which is currently experiencing rapid growth, what is most abundant are wealth creation miracles, and what is most lacking are those who can repeatedly create miracles.

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