Tech Talent Drop - Edition 20

Welcome to Edition 20 of Tech Talent Drop!

This week, AI’s biggest players shipped safety, product, and funding moves that will shape hiring plans for the rest of 2025. If you recruit in tech, this is a good moment to prep shortlists for AI safety, governance, and enterprise rollout roles. Let’s dive in.

The Drop

Enterprises are shifting from pilot chatbots to governed AI at scale. OpenAI outlined near-term upgrades that route sensitive conversations to higher-reasoning models and previewed parental controls, signaling a broader push on safeguards in production systems. Expect rising demand for safety engineers, risk and policy leads, and platform PMs who can harden AI features without slowing delivery.

AI Tool of the Week

Microsoft 365 Copilot update – Copilot Chat can now search across primary and archived mailboxes. For recruiters, that means faster retrieval of old candidate threads, prospects, and interview feedback right from chat. Tip: add “from my archives” to Copilot prompts.

Hiring and Interview Insight

Design a quick exercise that rewards uncertainty handling. OpenAI’s new paper argues that traditional accuracy-only evaluations push models toward confident errors. Translate that to people by asking candidates to flag when to pause, verify, or escalate AI output in a real task. You will spot thoughtful operators who ship safely at scale. OpenAI

Funding Watch

• Anthropic – AI platform – $13B – Series F – post-money $183B. Hiring signals: enterprise sales, safety, infra, partnerships.

• Mistral AI – Foundation models – €1.7B Series C, led in large part by ASML €1.3B, making Mistral Europe’s most valuable AI startup. Watch for growth across research, platform, and go-to-market in EU hubs.

• ProRata.ai – Publisher AI search – $40M Series B – launching Gist Answers and hiring across eng and customer roles.

• Augment – AI productivity – $85M Series A – scaling product and GTM.

• Sola Security – AI cybersecurity agents – $35M Series A. Talent needs: security research, agentic systems, enterprise integrations.

Quick Bytes

• OpenAI acquires Statsig and names Vijaye Raji CTO of Applications – expect accelerated experimentation inside ChatGPT product lines.

• OpenAI publishes Why language models hallucinate – useful context for teams building evals that penalize confident errors.

• Weekly mega-rounds recap – Anthropic’s raise leads the list, with AI continuing to dominate top deals.

• ASML to become top shareholder in Mistral AI, highlighting Europe’s AI sovereignty push and likely hiring momentum in Paris and beyond.

One to Watch

Governed AI rollouts – As safety and parental controls move into mainstream roadmaps, companies will staff for AI risk, policy, red-teaming, and platform security. Build shortlists now and map candidates who pair ML literacy with compliance and product instincts.

That’s this week’s Tech Talent Drop. If you want, I can also convert this into a LinkedIn-ready carousel or a shorter email version for clients.