Sam Altman Says Meta Offered $100 Million Bonuses To OpenAI Employees

June 17 (Reuters)— OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta has attempted to recruit some of the best employees at his company with signing bonuses that have been reported to reach as high as 100 million dollars. The assertion highlights the growing rivalry in Silicon Valley to hire top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) engineers.

Altman told his brother on an episode of the Uncapped podcast that Meta began to offer huge sums of money to many of the people on his team. You know, signing bonuses of a hundred million dollars or more and compensation of more than that per year. He further stated that none of the best employees at OpenAI have accepted the offers at Meta so far.

The remarks provide insight into the cutthroat strategies that large tech companies are implementing as they compete to create the next-generation AI models. Deep learning experts are now being wooed like professional athletes, with companies hoping that a small number of hires will be game changers.

Altman also stated that Meta considers OpenAI its largest rival, which is also reflected in the actions of the company. Only a few days ago, Meta invested 14.3 billion dollars in Scale AI, a data-labeling startup, and recruited its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to head a new superintelligence division.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, used to be a leader in the development of open-source AI. But it has recently been hit by the loss of key personnel and the failure to launch new AI models, falling behind competitors such as Google, DeepSeek in China, and OpenAI.

Meta has not responded to requests to comment, and Reuters has not independently confirmed the compensation levels that Altman cited. Nevertheless, the quote provides a unique insight into the intense competition over AI talent, a competition in which billions of dollars and the future of the industry are at stake.