In another universe, Sam Altman might have become an investment banker. Before dropping out of Stanford and eventually founding OpenAI, Altman said he was "peer pressured and tricked" into accepting a Goldman Sachs internship during his sophomore year.

"At the time, that was the cool thing. That was what everybody wanted to do," Altman told the audience at the Internapalooza Conference last month. "I got peer pressured and kind of tricked into it. I dutifully applied and got in and felt really cool."

Altman ultimately turned the offer down. "And then I didn't do it," he said. Instead, he worked on his location-based social networking startup Loopt, joined Y Combinator's first batch in 2005, and later became YC's president in 2014 at age 28. He then went on to launch frontier AI company OpenAI, which recently completed a $7 billion share sale as it eyes a potential trillion-dollar IPO as soon as the second half of 2026. Goldman Sachs is one of OpenAI's underwriters for that offering — a striking full-circle moment for a founder who once walked away from the bank.

Altman went on to discuss the merits of building one's own business rather than climbing the corporate ladder by "just doing stuff." In the age of AI — thanks in part to his own company — it has become far easier for someone to turn down a prestigious banking internship, even as Goldman's intern class acceptance rate has fallen below 1%.

Working at an establishment like Goldman, Altman suggested, means being around "people [who] put too much effort into trying to get taken seriously." Because banking careers are inherently hierarchical, there is little room to create. Startups, by contrast, offer that freedom.

"I think this is much more true now than ever before," he said. "You can make a whole startup, kind of by yourself in a room with a lot of AI tokens but not much else, and you don't need anyone to take you seriously to do that."

"You can get a long way in life and career just by doing stuff," Altman added, noting that OpenAI gives young adults significant responsibility for major projects because the company believes in "identifying and betting on young, unproven talent."

Recruiting From Wall Street

Years after Altman declined that Goldman offer, his company is now actively recruiting Wall Street talent. Junior investment bankers and senior banking veterans alike — including former Morgan Stanley managing director Alisha Lehr, who joined just last month — number among OpenAI's most recent hires. The company has enlisted more than 100 former investment bankers from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley to train AI models to build financial models and automate work traditionally handled by junior bankers, and there may be many more seats to fill. OpenAI reportedly plans to grow its workforce to 8,000 by the end of the year.

The recruiting push reflects a broader shift across leading AI labs, which are increasingly hiring domain experts from regulated industries — finance, law, healthcare — to help build models that can perform specialized professional tasks reliably enough for enterprise deployment. For banks, the talent outflow coincides with their own AI adoption efforts, creating competition for the same skilled workers.

OpenAI itself increasingly expects finance professionals to be AI-native. CFO Sarah Friar said in June that she probably would not hire a finance employee today who did not know how to use a tool like Codex, comparing it to knowing Excel.

"I would never hire a finance person who didn't know how to use Excel, and I probably wouldn't hire a finance person today that doesn't know how to use a tool like Codex," she said.

As some bankers depart for roles at AI labs, the financial sector is also becoming a broader battleground for enterprise AI business. Anthropic has launched roughly 10 pre-built AI agents for financial workflows — including pitchbooks, earnings analysis, credit memos, and underwriting — and Claude is already in production at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citi.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.