$100 million signing bonuses: Meta’s high-stakes raid on OpenAI’s top talent

The battle for AI supremacy has reached an unprecedented fever pitch, with tech giants deploying eye-popping offers to poach the industry’s brightest minds. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed that Meta is aggressively targeting his top engineers with staggering signing bonuses — some reaching as high as $100 million.

“They started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” Altman disclosed on the Uncapped podcast hosted by his brother on June 17. “Like $100 million signing bonuses, and more than that in annual compensation.” He added, “At least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”

Altman’s comments expose the increasingly ruthless competition unfolding behind closed doors as companies race to secure elite AI talent — a scarce commodity viewed as make-or-break in the sprint to dominate next-generation artificial intelligence.

Meta’s recruitment blitz comes as the Facebook parent aggressively ramps up its AI ambitions, recently injecting $14.3 billion into data-labeling startup Scale AI and appointing its founder, Alexandr Wang, to helm its new superintelligence division.

“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” Altman said, underscoring the rising tension between the two AI heavyweights.

Meta, once considered a frontrunner in open-source AI development, has struggled with key staff exits and delays in releasing its next-generation models. Meanwhile, rivals like Google, China’s DeepSeek, and OpenAI continue advancing their own cutting-edge platforms.

Meta declined to comment on Altman’s remarks, and Reuters has not independently verified the recruitment claims.

The escalating war for AI talent mirrors the world of professional sports, where superstar individual contributors are courted with astronomical contracts — each seen as potentially pivotal in determining who leads the coming AI revolution.