OpenAI recruits Wall Street talent as Sam Altman reflects on Goldman Sachs internship

Sam Altman almost became a banker. During his sophomore year at Stanford, the OpenAI CEO says he was “peer pressured and tricked” into accepting an internship at Goldman Sachs. He ultimately turned it down, choosing a path that led him through Y Combinator and eventually to running the most influential AI company on the planet. Now, in a twist that’s almost too neat, the company Altman built is pulling talent directly from the trading floors and deal rooms he avoided. OpenAI has recruited over 100 former investment bankers from firms including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley for an internal initiative called Project Mercury, which aims to bake sophisticated financial modeling capabilities into its AI systems. Project Mercury and the $150-an-hour bankers The initiative, first reported by Bloomberg in October 2025, is essentially OpenAI’s attempt to teach its AI how to do the work that keeps junior bankers chained to their desks until 2 a.m. Financial modeling, the bread and butter of entry-level Wall Street life, is the core target. The former bankers aren’t building AI from scratch. They’re serving as subject matter experts, feeding their institutional knowledge i...