Month after month, message after message, the AI engineer was hearing from Meta recruiters. The recruiters were pestering him to leave his employer and switch over to support the company’s AI efforts, and they were offering a sizable salary package to do so. But he wasn’t so sure.

The engineer, who works for a startup that was acquired by a leading AI company and requested anonymity from The Verge, said he had heard from friends that the company expected a lot of personal sacrifices in exchange for its high salaries, whether on employees’ value systems when it comes to Al or work-life balance. Engineers there, he heard, were working around the clock to catch up with rival companies like OpenAl, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft.

With so many firms desperately scrambling for AI talent, Meta was offering between $1–1.4 million in total annual compensation (which is typically measured as a combination of salary, annual bonus, and amortized stock value) for many AI roles. But, he suspected, its offers might be less generous than they sounded — tied heavily to subjective performance metrics that could be weaponized against employees. And just as importantly, he wasn’t willing to give up a semblance of work-life balance and a healthy work environment to make a few hundred thousand dollars more. He didn’t pursue the opportunity.

In recent months, Meta has launched on an AI hiring spree after making its largest-ever external investment: a $14.3 billion acquisition of a 49 percent stake in Scale AI, an industry giant that provides training data to fuel the technology of companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta. As part of the deal, Meta spun up a brand-new superintelligence lab led by Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang — and to staff the lab, it started poaching.

Meta has reportedly poached as many as 10 of OpenAI’s top researchers and model developers, with some pay packages reportedly adding up to $300 million over four years, including equity. (Meta disputes this figure.) It’s also approached a slew of other top AI talent across the industry. Ruoming Pang, who heads up Apple’s foundation AI models team, reportedly departed for Meta, and at least two Anthropic employees and two DeepMind employees have reportedly joined the team as well. The goal is to secure Meta’s spot in the race to achieve artificial general intelligence, or AGI: a hypothetical AI system that equals or surpasses human cognitive abilities, and the moving target that almost every AI company is currently chasing at breakneck speed. Meta’s primary weapon is vast amounts of money. But some sources across the AI industry question whether that will be enough.

Meta, to date, has not been the most exciting destination for budding AI engineers. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to make up for lost ground in the AI race, having spent years and significant resources over-indexing on the metaverse while competitors like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon invested billions in AI startups and signed cloud contracts and other deals. The company’s Llama AI models often rank low on publicly maintained performance leaderboards; at time of writing, Meta’s first appearance on one such leaderboard, Chatbot Arena, was at No. 30. In May, it reportedly delayed the launch of its new flagship AI model as developers struggled to deliver performance upgrades, and executives have been public on earnings calls about the need to aggressively invest and shore up against competition. The Scale AI deal, and Meta’s subsequent sky-high budget for hiring AI talent, is Zuckerberg’s Hail Mary: paying a premium for some of the brightest minds in the AI world to safeguard Meta’s future.

But although Meta is plying AI workers with staggering salaries, a mountain of money can’t buy everyone. Anthropic and DeepMind have reportedly had far fewer defections to Meta than OpenAI has, and that’s been an ongoing trend. The reason, to those inside the field, is obvious: the AI world is filled with true believers, and even the biggest companies need more than a cash offer to get many of them on their side.

Industry insiders emphasized to The Verge that in a sector where almost any company will offer job security and a good salary, experienced AI engineers and researchers want to work somewhere that aligns with their values, whether their top priority is AI safety and the risks the tech poses for humanity’s future, the ethical considerations of AI’s impact on society today, or accelerating and advancing the tech quicker than anyone else. Some engineers, researchers, or scientists the company has approached have turned down Meta’s advances, industry sources tell The Verge.

Competition for AI researchers is stiff, and building loyalty is vital. “At this point, at least a few hundred top researchers and engineers in the field are what’s sometimes called ‘post-money’ — they could retire, and you’re only going to attract or retain them if they believe in your vision, leadership style, etc.,” one AI industry source says.

But especially at OpenAI, Meta seems to have found the dollar value of company loyalty — and exceeded it. OpenAI has been uniquely affected by Meta’s mission to poach leading AI talent. As many as 10 of its top researchers and model developers have reportedly joined Meta, with some receiving large signing bonuses and equity. While its size and talent make it an inevitable prime target, the company is also vulnerable due to a controversial restructuring from a nonprofit to for-profit venture and the departures of high-profile executives who went on to start competing AI companies. It underwent a huge upheaval during Sam Altman’s November 2023 ouster by OpenAI’s board and his subsequent Uno Reverse-style rehiring, which saw most of the board members who opposed him resign. Employees have also shared concerns about non-disparagement agreements and policies that raised questions about whether they would be able to access their equity, eroding some trust in leadership even when the policies were walked back.

“A lot of the people working on this are genuinely convinced they’re building transformative technology that will reshape the world,” one source familiar with the situation tells The Verge. “For the people that were that mission-driven, there’s already been so much organizational turbulence” — he mentioned Altman’s firing and rehiring, OpenAI employees defecting to Anthropic, and governance changes — “that people are less anchored to the institution itself, so it’s easier to poach [from OpenAI] than the other labs.”

In lieu of an official comment, OpenAI directed The Verge to a blog post from its global affairs team, which states, “Some eye-popping offers are being extended these days to a handful of terrifically talented researchers, including to folks at OpenAI. Some of these offers are coming with deadlines of just a few hours – literally ‘exploding offers’ – or with restrictions on whether or how they can be discussed.” The blog post goes on to say the company plans to cultivate talent across not just research, but also product, engineering, infrastructure, scaling, and safety. On Wednesday, the company announced it had hired four engineers away from companies like Tesla, xAI, and Meta.

Now, OpenAI’s best defense against the losses is its own financial leverage. People that joined OpenAI early on, or even before the end of 2023, have had significant stock appreciation — the unit price jumped from $67 in a May 2023 tender offer to $210 at the end of 2024, according to a source familiar with the situation. And during the end of 2023, around the time of the OpenAI board roller coaster, there was a window in which OpenAI rushed to make hires from other companies who would sign on at the $67-per-unit figure, since there was a near-immediate 2.5x multiplier expected, the source says.

With so many companies competing to hire AI talent, there have been high-level departures at many different companies. But even before this most recent hiring frenzy, OpenAI’s employees were being lured elsewhere at a higher-than-average rate.

A 2025 SignalFire report analyzed retention patterns in AI and found that Anthropic was best at keeping people around, with 80 percent of employees hired at least two years ago at Anthropic remaining at the company at the conclusion of their second year. DeepMind came next at 78 percent, while OpenAI’s retention rate was markedly lower, at 67 percent — comparable to Meta’s 64 percent. The report, which came out in May before Meta’s Scale deal occurred, also found that engineers were “8 times more likely to leave OpenAI for Anthropic than the reverse,” and 11 times more likely to defect from DeepMind to Anthropic than the reverse.

Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives with the goal of carefully developing AI technology, describing itself as an “AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.” The company’s “mission-driven safety focus” is a convincing recruitment pitch and a key reason for its low turnover, one source familiar with the situation tells The Verge.

“I’ve seen, amongst people who are a little bit more seasoned in industry … they have watched tech as an industry change, and they’ve watched the people in the industry become very different, and the priorities of the companies become very different, and it’s not something that they’re happy with,” says Rumman Chowdhury, a longtime leader in the field of responsible AI at companies like Accenture and Twitter, who now heads up the AI nonprofit Humane Intelligence. When she’s hiring AI engineers, she says, they often say that salary hikes are less important to them than to “not be contributing to a worse world.”

AI engineers and researchers can afford that idealism, and concerns about safety and the rush to commercialize the technology have dogged most leading AI companies. At OpenAI, for instance, months of controversy and public pressure about its upcoming transition into a for-profit entity led to the company changing its plans, ceding some control to its nonprofit arm even after the restructuring. The decision followed a public letter written by ex-employees and civic leaders to the California and Delaware attorneys general, with one former employee writing, “OpenAI may one day build technology that could get us all killed.”

There are questions, too, about the pace at which Meta is moving and its research priorities. Meta’s Scale AI investment came on the heels of Joelle Pineau’s departure as Meta VP and head of its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division, a unit Meta folded into its larger AI efforts after previously describing it as “one of the only groups in the world with all the prerequisites for delivering true breakthroughs with some of the brightest minds in the industry.” Some saw FAIR’s restructuring as a sign that Meta was prioritizing products over research, an industry-wide concern for some AI safety experts.

For Meta, however, there are also pragmatic questions about its future in AI. In conversations with The Verge, industry insiders questioned whether Wang is the right choice to head the new lab, since Scale AI does not build frontier models and Wang himself doesn’t have an AI research background. And even Meta executives admit that catching up will be a challenge. During its most recent earnings call in April, Zuckerberg — who called one of Meta’s focuses for 2025 “making Meta AI the leading personal AI” — touched on the competition he was up against. “The pace of progress across the industry and the opportunities ahead for us are staggering. I want to make sure that we’re working aggressively and efficiently, and I also want to make sure that we are building out the leading infrastructure and teams we need to achieve our goals,” he said.

Just two months later, that team became Meta’s superintelligence lab. But the AI engineer who steered clear doesn’t regret his decision.

“You’re expected to give pretty much your whole self to Meta AI,” he says. The money simply wasn’t good enough for that.