The empty nest is filling back up.
Millions of young adults are delaying life on their own as high housing costs keep them living with mom and dad. In 2025, 25.2 million adults under 35 lived with a parent, according to new data from Realtor.com. That amounts to roughly one in three people in that age group.
The numbers point to a housing market that remains difficult to break into, even for young adults with jobs and college degrees, the outlet reported.
“The adults living with their parents today are largely employed, and many hold college degrees,” Hannah Jones, senior economist at Realtor.com, said in a statement. “What’s holding them back isn’t a lack of qualifications, but rather, at least in part, a lack of housing they can actually afford. This is a supply story, not an employment story.”
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That supply problem has been years in the making. The U.S. is short roughly 4 million homes, with entry-level properties especially scarce. The gap has widened since construction slowed following the 2008 financial crisis, Realtor.com reported.
About 70% of 25- to-34-year-olds living with their parents have jobs. In 2000, about one in nine employed adults in their late 20s lived at home. By 2025, that share had climbed to nearly one in seven.
For many young Americans, moving out has become increasingly expensive.
The national median home listing price is $430,000, up 34.4% from 2019, while the median asking rent has climbed to $1,673, up 17.9% over the same period, according to Realtor.com.
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The delayed move into independent living could eventually translate into a wave of future housing demand.
As affordability improves or more homes are built, millions of young adults who postponed renting or buying could enter the market, Realtor.com reported.
“Twenty-five million adults living with their parents represents a generation of latent demand the market hasn’t absorbed,” Jones said. “Every adult still in a childhood bedroom is a household not formed, a lease unsigned, a starter home unpurchased. The typical first-time buyer is now 40 — that’s not a coincidence, it’s the math of a market that hasn’t built enough.”
The delay can also have long-term financial consequences.
Each year spent living at home can delay a young adult’s ability to build housing equity, Realtor.com noted.
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The outlook is not getting easier. According to new projections from National Association of Realtors (NAR) chief economist Lawrence Yun, the national median home price is on track to hit $1 million by 2050 — just as millennials reach the traditional retirement age.
“Essentially, in about 25 years the national median home price will be a million dollars,” Yun said at a conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. “It may be hard to envision that, but back in 1990, the national median price was $90,000.”

For years, a job at Google was the ultimate status symbol in tech. Now, a new pair of employers is attracting the industry’s most ambitious workers.
OpenAI and Anthropic have become the hottest career destinations in Silicon Valley, drawing a flood of applicants eager to work at the epicenter of the AI boom. The workers are chasing prestige and the chance to help shape a technological revolution — plus to potentially cash in on the most anticipated IPOs in tech history.
Across Reddit, Blind and X, job seekers are swapping interview tips and hiring rumors for both companies, hoping to break in. Several executives have ditched other employers to join the labs. Sundeep Teki, a career coach who helps place talent at AI companies, told Business Insider that nearly every candidate he speaks with has the same goal. On a form asking which companies they want to target, “nine times out of 10,” he said, applicants list OpenAI or Anthropic.
“Anthropic is the No. 1 priority,” Teki said. He added that with either name on a résumé, an employee has options: “No matter what you end up doing after you move on from Anthropic or OpenAI, you’re bound to be successful.”
The companies’ tech is reshaping the economy — and the workforce from which they hire. Codex and Claude Code have transformed the work of software engineers, helping usher in an era of AI-attributed layoffs at companies like Square and Cloudflare. Meanwhile, the two frontier AI labs have avoided job cuts, and offer lucrative compensation packages, abundant resources, and ambitious plans.
“There’s almost an exclusivity in it for those who are working there,” said Randy Ksar, a content marketer who applied to Anthropic for the same reason he once worked at Yahoo — it’s a brand he respects. “You want to be part of something big.”
Both companies are growing fast as they compete for customers, reckon with their impact, and fight for technological supremacy. Anthropic, which has more than 3,500 employees, lists around 380 open roles. OpenAI has about 720 open jobs — the company is looking to almost double its 4,500-person workforce this year, The Financial Times reported in March.
Business Insider spoke with applicants, job coaches, and Big Tech employees about the frontier labs, and why they’re drawing such rabid demand.
Workers see Anthropic as the new Google or Apple, and they want in
Jesse Ratner, a veteran tech copywriter and brand strategist, has watched firsthand as AI tools strip away some jobs from his profession. Still, he applied to Anthropic, and almost fell for a fake Anthropic recruitment scam this May. When he saw the scam message, he told his wife the “hottest company in the world” was recruiting him.
“It’s like, 10 years ago, landing a job at Google or before that, Apple,” Ratner, who is currently freelancing, told Business Insider.
Some workers are looking back further into corporate history. Marx Ojemudia, a designer, told Business Insider that he views a job at an AI lab as a route to long-term stability, likening it to his father’s 30-year career at Ford Motor Company in Michigan. He’s recently applied to both OpenAI and Anthropic, and has messaged the employees who posted the jobs, hoping to get his resume and cover letter reviewed.
Charles Broomfield, a 26-year-old ex-Amazon employee who recently started as an engineering analyst at Google, told Business Insider that his impression is that “Anthropic is winning the AI race,” and being at a top startup as the world undergoes a technological revolution offers a unique opportunity to prospective employees. While tech giants like Meta or Microsoft are past their hyper-growth phase, startups like OpenAI and Anthropic offer workers the chance to make millions off an IPO, he said.
“The exciting thing about startups is always that they have massive room for growth,” Broomfield said, adding that “everyone wants to work for a company that pays as well as Big Tech and seems like a sure bet for huge continued growth.”
Anthropic and OpenAI regularly list jobs with six-figure salaries, even before equity pay.
However, he has some concerns about those startups, given the possibilities of an AI bubble and further job automation.
“I’m hesitant to think any company is layoff-proof if they are able to do the work with AI,” said Broomfield, who was previously laid off from Amazon.
The best weapon in the tech talent wars might be Claude
Rune Kvist, who worked at Anthropic when it had fewer than 50 employees, told Business Insider he thinks that what draws the most interest to the top labs is simple — their results. Over the last two years, Anthropic and OpenAI have released one cutting-edge model after another. Anthropic’s safety-focused marketing wouldn’t really help the company sell itself, Kvist said, if it didn’t continuously impress with its tech.
“I actually think the vibes are downstream of the models, rather than the other way,” said Kvist. He called Claude a “powerful cultural force,” noting that if people are spending hours a day on the chatbot, they’re likely to put the company behind it in a positive light.
Kathleen Bartin, who estimates that she’s applied to 40 roles at Anthropic, is proof positive. She returned to the workforce after parenting full-time in 2025, and told Business Insider that her introduction to AI — first with ChatGPT, then in a Zoom presentation — had her swiftly hooked. After the presentation, she immediately bought subscriptions to Anthropic and Perplexity, a research-oriented AI tool.
Within the week, she was looking for jobs at Anthropic. She said she’d open doors, fetch coffee — she just wants to be part of it.
“I was smitten,” she said. “It was all that I talked about. My kids thought I was crazy… They were all like, ‘Mom, don’t talk to me about AI. Just don’t. You’re nuts.’ But yeah, I started applying kind of immediately upon meeting Claude and I just haven’t gone back. It’s like my dream job.”
While applying for jobs across the company, Bartin has fashioned herself into an AI consultant. She’s learned more about the tools, attends hackathons, and got a contract gig helping a fintech startup integrate AI into its work. At her part-time jewelry store job, she once whipped out a laptop and gave her visiting friend a Claude demo, she said.
Bartin was offered an interview at Anthropic but missed the email while on a trip, she said. She didn’t hear back again, and hasn’t for dozens of the other applications. Still, she brims with praise for the company, which she said she trusts more than others to shepherd the tech forward. Bartin was one of a few applicants who praised Anthropic’s spat with the Department of Defense earlier this year to Business Insider.
Karli Jaenike, a marketer who has also applied to Anthropic, said the lab’s stance against surveillance of Americans “solidified my love for them.”
“AI could go a few different ways,” she said. “So seeing a company that’s really taking responsibility to build something in a more ethical way really, really resonates with me.”
For a top-end job, workers face an uphill fight
If getting a Big Tech job is a challenge, landing a role at a frontier lab is a whole different beast.
“The competition is fiercer than anywhere,” Michelle Perchuk, founder of MTV Coaching and a career acceleration strategist, negotiation coach, and former talent acquisition worker, told Business Insider. “It’s like getting into the hot new restaurant in town.”
She said while Big Tech companies might highly value an Ivy League degree or a big-name company in the hiring process, frontier AI labs are increasingly focused on identifying exceptional talent outside of conventional standards.
“AI companies hire based on critical thinking and test thinking,” Perchuk said, adding that the latter skillset refers to people who can be patient and iterate until a desired solution is reached.
Teki, who has placed one client at Anthropic and has others in the interview process, said that both OpenAI and Anthropic have some of the most difficult technical interviews in the industry right now. He’s seen new kinds of hiring hurdles, like a take-home assignment that assesses how an applicant uses AI coding tools. For technical roles, the companies usually have one or two rounds of screening followed by multiple interviews, he said. There are usually several focused on coding, machine learning, and designing systems. There’s also usually a behavioral round, with more value-oriented questions to test for culture fit.
Both startups seem selective about candidates who align with their missions, Teki said. Anthropic tends to be very “safety-centric,” while OpenAI is more focused on AGI, or artificial general intelligence, he added.
“The demand is so high that the companies are very, very selective, and they get to pick and choose the very best of talent that’s available right now, coming either from the Big Tech or from some of the leading startups in the US and other countries,” Teki said.
Proven executives have flocked to the labs. OpenAI plucked Instacart’s and Slack’s CEOs for its leadership team, and picked up Sarah Friar, who steered Square and Nextdoor through IPOs, as its CFO. Anthropic employs execs who cut their teeth at Google, Microsoft, Instagram, and Stripe, and the lab recently hired Tesla’s former AI director, Andrej Karpathy.
Teki said some candidates land interviews when the company comes to them. People who build projects in public and showcase their work on GitHub or social media can catch the attention of recruiters, particularly when their projects closely align with the work being done by specific teams at Frontier AI Labs.
Kvist, the former Anthropic employee, said he thinks the company has kept up a high bar for its workforce since its early days. But the rapid growth is a chance for less well-known workers to get a foot in the door.
“To grow over the last year from 1,000 to 4,000 people, you have to hire a lot of people who are not top 10 in their fields,” Kvist said. “You just run out of the top 10.”

Meta has lobbied U.S. lawmakers for legal immunity from lawsuits alleging child harm from its social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, according to a report.
This comes as Meta faces a wave of youth-safety litigation, including thousands of similar claims consolidated in California state courts and separate lawsuits brought by states and school districts. Meta and Google, which owns YouTube, were hit with a combined $6 million in damages after a Los Angeles jury found them negligent in a bellwether case alleging Instagram and YouTube were designed in ways that harmed a young user. Both companies have said they plan to appeal.
If language like Meta’s proposal is adopted by lawmakers and signed into law as part of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) under consideration in the Senate, the provision could undermine pending and future complaints against Meta and other social media platforms regarding child safety.
Lawmakers have not said they would be open to adopting the language, but the lobbying effort shows the kind of legal protections Meta is seeking amid government attempts to regulate online platforms.
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The proposed language would make online companies “immune from suit or liability under state law with respect to all claims for loss caused by, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the safety or privacy of individuals under the age of eighteen online or otherwise related to the provisions” of KOSA, according to Reuters.
The proposal appears alongside language that seeks to have the federal measure overrule state laws on children’s online safety and privacy.
Meta spokesperson Stephanie Otway told Reuters that the provision “does not extinguish existing lawsuits, nor does it represent blanket immunity.”
“Instead, it establishes uniform national standards for online youth safety, ensuring these critical issues are governed by comprehensive federal legislation, not plaintiffs’ lawyers or patchwork state legislation,” she said.
But Julia Duncan of the American Association for Justice, a group that represents trial lawyers, said that if the provision were to be adopted, it would kill any lawsuits pending when the law took effect.
“The language is pretty clear-cut immunity against every parent, every school district, that is seeking to hold any AI or social media company accountable for harm” to children, Duncan said. “There is no other way to read this language.”
Meta has proposed the language in exchange for dropping its efforts to oppose KOSA, a source told Reuters.
KOSA, sponsored by Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., would require social media companies to take steps to prevent certain harms to minors, including compulsive use of their platforms.
The measure is now the subject of negotiations between Blackburn and the White House to package online child safety bills with a provision that would preempt some state laws regarding AI.
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“We have not seen that proposed language and would never consider it,” a spokesperson for the GOP senator told Reuters.
Under the bill, tech companies would need to use care in adding specific features such as infinite scrolling, activity notifications and appearance-changing photograph filters.
A woman won at trial earlier this year against Meta and Google, which owns YouTube, after her lawyers successfully argued the companies were aware these features were addictive and harmful to young people. The tech companies plan to appeal the ruling.
KOSA passed in the Senate in 2024 before failing in the House. The measure was reintroduced this year with support from both Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

President Donald Trump said Thursday that Apple has agreed to work with Intel on designing and producing chips in the U.S.
“When I won my Second Term, it was clear America needed its Semiconductor Industry to come back to the U.S.A. We design everything, but we need to BUILD it here, NOW! So I decided to help Intel because we need to design and build our Chips right here in America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The partnership could help Apple diversify its manufacturing base as it looks for additional chip capacity. The tech giant relies heavily ​on the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which has advanced production ​lines in ⁠high demand from AI chipmakers such as Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.
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Intel shares rose in premarket trading following the announcement from the president.
“The Technology the World relies on was invented in America. We all remember ‘Intel Inside.’ Stupid Presidents took our Economy for granted, and let Taiwan and others steal our Semiconductor Factories,” Trump said.
Intel reportedly reached a preliminary agreement to make some chips for Apple after more than a year of talks. Apple and Intel have not publicly detailed which chips or products would be involved.
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An Apple contract would give Intel steady demand from a top consumer electronics company after its reputation and manufacturing business fell behind TSMC in recent years.
Earlier this week, Intel announced that a new generation of its manufacturing technology, 18A-P, had entered initial production, as the chipmaker works to meet demand for advanced processors.
Last year, the Trump administration took a roughly 10% stake in Intel and announced plans to invest billions of dollars in the chipmaker to build or expand factories in the U.S.
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The Trump administration took a roughly 10% stake in Intel last year and announced plans to invest billions of dollars in the chipmaker to build or expand factories in the U.S.
Trump previously said he “should have asked for more” of a stake in Intel after the value of the federal government’s Intel position rose sharply.
“When was the last time a President made America money??” Trump wrote on Thursday.
The administration has been boosting efforts to secure U.S. supply chains for critical minerals and semiconductors, including by taking equity stakes in companies as part of an effort to cut reliance on China.

Dutch chip-equipment giant ASML Holding NV is contending with its biggest challenge yet under the Trump administration: In a series of recent meetings, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick outlined concerns to ASML’s senior leaders that one of its top-of-the-line machines may have made its way into China, in violation of US-led export restrictions.
In the meetings, Lutnick expressed concern to ASML executives over the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV, machines, according to people familiar with the talks. EUV systems are used by firms such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to manufacture processors for the likes of Nvidia Corp. and Apple Inc., and ASML has never been allowed to ship them to China because of curbs imposed during the first Trump administration.