- Big Tech is shelling out jaw-dropping compensation amid a fierce AI talent war. Meta is even offering $100m signing bonuses to woo top OpenAI researchers, according to CEO Sam Altman. But as top AI companies scramble to retain staff with massive bonuses and noncompete deals, entry-level engineers are seeing fewer opportunities amid a declining junior hiring trend.
The AI talent war has been heating up between Big Tech companies as they vie for an increasingly small group of elite AI researchers. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta has been aggressively going after the company’s top engineers—offering eye-watering compensation and multi-million dollar signing bonuses.
Altman said on an episode of Uncapped that Meta had been making “giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” some totaling “$100 million signing bonuses and more than that [in] compensation per year.”
It’s the latest example of the intense competition for top talent and the lengths companies are willing to go to recruit and retain them.
Meta is particularly committed to its AI recruiting drive at the moment. The company has lost several of its top AI researchers in recent years and currently is fighting a narrative that it has fallen behind in the AI race after its newest Llama 4 model received a lukewarm reaction from developers.
This has kicked Zuckerberg into overdrive and reportedly led the CEO to personally recruit for a new 50-person “Superintelligence” AI team at Meta. Meta also recently invested up to $15 billion for a 49% stake in the training data company, ScaleAI, as part of a plan to hire the company’s CEO Alexandr Wang.
While Altman said that none of his best people had decided to take up Mark Zuckerberg’s generous offer, Meta has managed to lure other prominent AI researchers.
According to Bloomberg, Meta has also hired Jack Rae, a principal researcher at GoogleDeepMind, for the team and brought on Johan Schalkwyk, a machine learning leader from the AI voice startup Sesame AI. Meta was reportedly unsuccessful in its efforts to poach top OpenAI researcher, Noam Brown, and Google’s AI architect, Koray Kavukcuoglu.
Meta is also trailing fellow AI labs with a retention rate of 64%, according to SignalFire’s recently released 2025 State of Talent Report. At buzzy AI startup Anthropic, 80% of employees hired at least two years ago are still at the company, an impressive figure in an industry known for its high turnover.
Representatives for Meta did not immediately respond to a recent request for comment from Fortune, made outside the company’s normal working hours.
AI talent gap
Zuckerberg’s salary offers are reaching the pro-athlete threshold, which, as Fortune’s Sharon Goldman notes, is becoming par for the course in the industry.
Deedy Das, a VC at Menlo Ventures, previously told Fortune that he has heard from several people the Meta CEO has tried to recruit. “Zuck had phone calls with potential hires trying to convince them to join with a $2M/yr floor.”
While Meta may be making headlines, it is not the only company going to extreme lengths to retain and recruit this talent. Google DeepMind is reportedly enforcing six-to-12-month noncompete clauses that prevent some AI researchers from joining competitors—paying them full salaries even while they’re sidelined.
Over at OpenAI, the company is rumored to be offering sky-high compensation to retain talent, with top researchers earning over $10 million annually. According to Reuters, the company has offered more than $2 million in retention bonuses and equity packages exceeding $20 million to deter defections to Ilya Sutskever’s new venture, SSI.
While elite AI labs are working overtime to lock in top talent, the full picture for AI engineers, especially junior talent, is not quite so rosy. Several recent reports, including SignalFire’s 2025 State of Talent Report, have suggested that entry-level hiring in the tech industry is collapsing.
According to the report, hiring for mid and senior-level roles has bounced back from the 2023 slump but the cuts for new grads have just kept coming. Among Big Tech companies, new grads account for just 7% of hires, down 25% from 2023 and over 50% from pre-pandemic levels in 2019. For startups, new grads make up less than 6% of new hires, down 11% from 2023 and over 30% from pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
