Meta is going all-in on snatching AI talent, throwing $100 million signing bonuses and $100 million+ yearly pay at top engineers, says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Altman spilled the details on an episode of Uncapped, revealing that Meta’s giant offers target many from OpenAI’s team.
Meta’s under fire after its Llama 4 launch flopped, pushing Mark Zuckerberg to build a 50-person “Superintelligence” AI squad personally. The company just dropped up to $15 billion for a 49% stake in ScaleAI—aiming to hire CEO Alexandr Wang. 
Altman admits no top OpenAI staff have jumped ship yet, but Meta has landed others like Jack Rae from Google DeepMind and Johan Schalkwyk from Sesame AI, per Bloomberg. They struck out on poaching OpenAI’s Noam Brown and Google’s Koray Kavukcuoglu.
Meta’s retention rate sits at 64%, trailing rivals. Anthropic leads with an 80% retention of employees hired over two years ago, per SignalFire’s 2025 State of Talent Report.
Meta reps didn’t respond to a comment request from Fortune.
VC Deedy Das told Fortune Zuckerberg offers “$2M/yr floor” to potential new hires, rivaling pro-athlete paychecks.
Google DeepMind uses 6-12 month noncompetes, paying sidelined AI researchers full salary to block competitor moves, reports Business Insider.
Meanwhile, top OpenAI researchers reportedly pull $10M+ a year. Reuters says OpenAI dishes $2M+ retention bonuses and $20M+ equity to keep talent from defecting to Ilya Sutskever’s new venture, SSI.
But the AI gold rush isn’t helping junior talent. SignalFire data shows new grad hiring in Big Tech has crashed—now just 7% of hires, down 25% from 2023 and over 50% from 2019. Startups fare worse, at sub-6% new grad hires.
The AI war is a bloodsport for senior engineers. The newbies? Not so lucky.
