Sam Altman cries foul over Mark Zuckerberg's AI talent poaching
“They have been trying to recruit people for a super long time,” the OpenAI CEO said in a note to employees.
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It’s another day in the talent wars between OpenAI and Meta and now Sam Altman is taking a turn at his rival.
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The OpenAI CEO called out Meta for poaching talent from his company.
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“Meta is acting in a way that feels somewhat distasteful,” Altman wrote in a Slack message to employees on Monday obtained by Wired.
Over the past week, Meta recruited four senior OpenAI researchers to join its newly formed “superintelligence lab,” setting off a feud between the two tech companies.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly been reaching out directly to OpenAI employees with aggressive offers, including signing bonuses and first-year compensation packages rumored to be as high as $100 million, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“They have been trying to recruit people for a super long time,” Altman’s note continued. “I've lost track of how many people from here they've tried to get to be their Chief Scientist.”
The executive then pitched his employees to remain at OpenAI. Altman has framed Meta as pushing a short‑term compensation play over long‑term innovation culture.
Chief research officer Mark Chen told Wired that he’s been working with Altman “around the clock” to talk to employees considering Meta offers and that the company is “recalibrating comp” and rolling out ways to recognize top talent. That includes personalized retention efforts, last-minute counteroffers, and what Chen described as “creative” reward strategies.
Meanwhile, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has defended the company’s approach, acknowledging such scarce talent “commands a significant market premium.”
Zuckerberg’s "superintelligence lab" — an AI research group focused on building artificial general intelligence — has become a high-priority project at Meta as the company looks to catch up to OpenAI’s lead and jockeys for pole position in a crowded AI field. Internally, Meta’s group is said to include roughly 50 top researchers, with new hires coming from not just OpenAI but also Google’s DeepMind, Anthropic, and Scale AI. According to The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg has been personally involved in the recruitment push (inviting top talent to his homes and creating a “Recruiting Party” group chat with other Meta execs).
— Shannon Carroll contributed to this article.