To Sam Altman's "Poaching" OpenAI Talent Charge, Meta CTO's "Dishonest" Reply

Meta has hit back at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for alleging that the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is offering $100 million compensation packages to poach AI researchers.

During an all-hands company meeting last week, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth debunked Mr Altman's claim that Meta was paying "$100 million signing bonuses" and "more than that" in compensation to recruit OpenAI workers on its AI superintelligence team, according to The Verge.

"Sam is just being dishonest here," Mr Bosworth, 43, claimed during the meeting. "He implies we are doing this action for everyone. You see, the market is booming. It's not really hot."

Mr Altman recently expressed his happiness that none of OpenAI's "best people" decided to join Meta. During an appearance on the Uncapped podcast last week, Mr Altman further stoked controversy, claiming Meta "started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team."

"You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that (in) compensation per year," he claimed.

Three leading OpenAI researchers - Xiaohua Zhai, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Lucas Beyer - each denied receiving a $100 million bonus for joining Meta, claiming it was "fake news" on X (formerly Twitter).

hey all, couple quick notes:
1) yes, we will be joining Meta.
2) no, we did not get 100M sign-on, that's fake news.

Excited about what's ahead though, will share more in due time!

cc @__kolesnikov__ and @XiaohuaZhai.

— Lucas Beyer (bl16) (@giffmana) June 26, 2025

"Sam is known to exaggerate, and I know exactly why he is doing it, which is because we are succeeding at getting talent from OpenAI," Mr Bosworth said.

The ChatGPT creator is engaged in a fierce battle with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to create cutting-edge artificial intelligence.

Mark Zuckerberg, 41, has recently intensified his efforts to develop superintelligence-AI that is more intelligent than humans in terms of knowledge, memory, and reasoning. The company reportedly invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and established a new AI lab aimed at obtaining "superintelligence."

Meta has acquired the services of former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, the CEO of Safe Superintelligence, a $32 billion AI business.

Trapit Bansal, a key AI researcher who has worked with OpenAI since 2022 and helped develop the company's initial AI reasoning model, reportedly departed the company for Meta on Thursday, according to TechCrunch.