OpenAI to award stock and cash bonuses to 1,000 employees

OpenAI will award substantial quarterly bonuses for the next two years to about 1,000 employees, roughly one-third of its full-time workforce, as the company rolls out its latest flagship model, GPT-5.

The decision, first reported by The Verge, was announced by CEO Sam Altman in a surprise message to staff via Slack on the eve of GPT-5’s release. The bonuses will primarily go to researchers and software engineers in the applied engineering, scaling, and safety divisions — teams central to the development and deployment of OpenAI’s most advanced systems.

According to The Verge, the payouts will vary widely based on position and experience. Top researchers are expected to receive mid-single-digit millions of dollars, while senior engineers will be awarded hundreds of thousands. The bonuses will be issued quarterly for two years and can be taken in cash, stock, or a mix of both.

In his message, Altman linked the move directly to market pressures, particularly the increasing competition for AI talent in Silicon Valley.

“As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we have been looking at comp for our technical teams given the movement in the market,” Altman wrote in the Slack message quoted by The Verge. “We very much intend to keep increasing comp as we keep doing better and better as a company. But we wanted to be transparent about this one since it’s a new thing for us.”

A Heated Battle for AI Talent

The announcement comes amid what analysts describe as an unprecedented “war for AI talent”. In recent months, OpenAI has lost several high-profile researchers to rivals, including Meta’s AI research unit. Elon Musk’s xAI is also actively recruiting senior machine learning talent, with compensation packages designed to lure away experienced engineers from established labs.

Industry observers say Altman’s latest move reflects a broader trend among AI companies: leveraging large retention bonuses to secure the specialised skills needed to develop cutting-edge models. Bloomberg has previously reported that leading AI firms are offering multi-million-dollar pay packages to experienced researchers in order to prevent them from joining competitors.

Altman has repeatedly highlighted India’s importance to OpenAI’s growth, calling it the company’s second-largest market after the United States and predicting it could eventually become its biggest. While the bonus programme was announced company-wide, industry experts note that competition for AI talent is growing rapidly in India as well, particularly in research hubs such as Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

GPT-5 Rollout

The timing of the announcement coincides with the release of GPT-5, which OpenAI has described as its most capable and efficient system to date. In a company blog post, OpenAI detailed GPT-5’s new architecture, which combines a “smart, efficient model” for general queries with a “deeper reasoning model” — branded GPT-5 Thinking — for more complex problems. A real-time routing system automatically determines which version to deploy based on the conversation’s complexity, the tools required, and the user’s stated intent.

The model is available to all ChatGPT users, with Plus subscribers given higher usage limits and Pro subscribers gaining access to GPT-5 Pro, which offers extended reasoning capabilities for advanced tasks.

OpenAI claims GPT-5 delivers more accurate, context-aware responses and faster turnaround times than its predecessors, thanks to improvements in both model design and infrastructure scaling.