SAN FRANCISCO: Akash Samant has long believed he should pay for most expenses in a relationship, whether it is rent or date nights or vacations abroad. He grew up in Arizona, and his parents raised him to take pride in being able to provide for others. Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence boom has helped him do just that.
Samant, 26, met his long-distance girlfriend, Valeria Barojas, 24, on a dating app in September 2024 after he cofounded Coverflow, an AI startup that serves insurance agencies. The startup raised US$4.8mil (RM18.8mil) in venture capital funding last year. (Samant declined to disclose the company’s valuation.) He lives in San Francisco, and Barojas is in Glendale, Arizona, where she is completing her undergraduate degree in social work at Arizona State University and living off her savings.
When the couple visit each other, Samant pays for their flights. When they travelled together to Paris last year, he paid for the hotel and dinners.
Samant’s company has provided him a compensation package that exceeds anything he previously made in his career as an engineer. He earns US$120,000 (RM470,460) to US$160,000 (RM627,280) in base salary and has a substantial equity stake as a co-founder. His dream scenario? Making enough money from his company going public or being acquired to give Barojas the choice to opt out of working. But not without a prenup, a topic that came up last month after he and Barojas had been dating for about a year and half.
“Everyone’s effort is always going to look different to someone else’s,” Barojas said, regarding splitting expenses in a relationship. “My 100% can be someone’s 60%, and vice versa.”
The AI frenzy is creating personal fortunes rarely seen in modern technology, changing people’s attitudes about fairness and money in relationships. Nearly 25% of people said higher compensation amid the AI boom had changed the way they split expenses with a partner, according to a survey of more than 1,000 people conducted last month by Blind, a forum where people can anonymously discuss work. About 9% of respondents said the AI boom had made them think differently about prenuptial agreements or financial protections.
Technology companies are paying AI employees premium salaries, with some researchers negotiating US$250mil (RM980mil) pay packages. Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are raising billions of dollars to keep up with investments in AI startups. OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX, which recently merged with xAI, have taken steps toward initial public offerings. Those public listings alone could mint more than 16,000 millionaires, according to an estimate compiled by Sacra, which provides research on private markets.
For people working in tech, a prenup is often expected, said Lauren Lavender, chief marketing officer at HelloPrenup, a startup that allows couples to create prenuptial agreements. It can be surprising when a couple doesn’t get one, she added. Some tech workers who use HelloPrenup have equity compensation packages that are worth more than their base salaries.
“People in the Bay Area – because they work in an industry that could potentially be overtaken by AI – they’re fully aware of the assets that they have,” she said. “They have a lifestyle that they want to protect.”
Since Gujri Singh, 31, joined OpenAI at the end of 2023 as a member of its sales team, she said, signing a prenuptial agreement with a future partner before marriage is nonnegotiable.
“I know how hard it has been for women to be financially independent and be in situations where they’re not in control,” she said. “To me, that has always been the scariest thing.”
Singh, who is single, said a former boyfriend became more understanding about her desire for a prenup after she was hired by OpenAI, where, she said, she earns between US$200,000 (RM783,800) and US$300,000 (RM1.17mil) annually, in addition to equity in the privately held company.
“I think what I have today will not be the totality of what I earn in my career,” she said. “I’m, quite frankly, just getting started.”
OpenAI is paying employees more than any other major tech startup in history, The Wall Street Journal reported in December, with the company’s stock-based compensation alone reaching an average of US$1.5mil (RM5.8mil) per employee in 2025. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, over copyright infringement of news content. Both companies have denied wrongdoing.)
Highly paid employees are making relationship and money decisions amid uncertainty about whether their equity will crash or soar, whether their company will go public or be acquired, and whether the AI bubble will burst. This uncertainty is a big reason technology employees gravitate toward prenups, said Sam Mockford, an associate wealth adviser at Citrine Capital, based in San Francisco.
“A prenup is thinking about the near future and the far future and the what-if future,” she said. “And when you’re looking at equity, there’s a lot that’s variable about your future wealth.”
Even when both partners are in high-paying fields such as consulting and technology, the AI gold rush has widened pay gaps.
Megan Lieu, 29, founder of ML Data, a company that creates content about AI and technology, said her earnings had soared since 2022, the year of ChatGPT’s release. She has since teamed up with Anthropic, Nvidia, Salesforce and Adobe, all companies that have financially benefited from artificial intelligence.
Lieu’s company made more than US$660,000 (RM2,586,870) last year, with brand deals the main source of revenue, she said. She earns about five times as much as her boyfriend, Daniel Kim, 32, who works in management consulting, and they live together in the Washington, DC, area in a property she owns. Though Kim pays Lieu about an equal share in mortgage costs each month, she covers a bigger portion of other housing expenses like homeowners association fees and utilities.
Lieu and Kim have informally discussed what a prenup might look like. If one person’s investment blows up, Kim doesn’t necessarily view it as individual, saying the other partner contributed indirectly, including through support and sacrifices.
“When you agree to get married,” he said, “you’re kind of agreeing to become one.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
