Market landscapes / Model Development
Foundation Model Labs companies
The labs training frontier and near-frontier models. Anthropic, Cohere, AI21 Labs and others. It is a small field for the amount of attention it takes up, and three quarters of it is hiring right now. Only 1 of the 32 has been acquired, which in a field this valuable says more about what these companies cost than about anyone's appetite.
Updated 12 October 2026
32 companies
1 acquired
25 hiring now
The rest of the Model Development landscape
The full map, including the sub-sectors too small to list separately.
The whole Model Development mapAI Research Labs (Reasoning, Interpretability, Safety) 22Model Training & Fine-Tuning 16Reinforcement Learning & Post-Training 14
I am Ben Jackson. I map this market and I hire the commercial teams inside it: sales, marketing, product and delivery. If you are building a team in Foundation Model Labs, here is how I work. The whole market in numbers.