OpenAI offers multimillion-dollar bonuses to 1,000 employees ahead of GPT‑5 launch

Sam Altman confirms the decision in a Slack message to staff, as OpenAI prepares for a $500 billion valuation and intensifies talent retention strategies.

OpenAI has launched one of its most aggressive internal compensation initiatives to date, distributing multimillion-dollar retention bonuses to nearly 1,000 of its most critical employees.

The move, confirmed in early August 2025 just before the official rollout of GPT‑5, reflects the company’s growing concerns about talent attrition in the hyper-competitive AI market and positions OpenAI to consolidate loyalty among applied researchers, engineers, and safety experts in anticipation of a major secondary stock offering.

The first leaks revealed the scale: bonuses between hundreds of thousands and several million dollars

The news first surfaced in a report by The Information, detailing a comprehensive bonus scheme targeting approximately one-third of OpenAI’s workforce — about 1,000 employees. The bonuses range widely: engineers are reportedly receiving between $200,000 and $600,000, while key researchers in AI alignment and scaling teams are being awarded “mid-single-digit millions.” The company is offering flexibility in the form of compensation, with recipients able to choose between stock, cash, or a hybrid structure.

Payment is being distributed over two years in quarterly vesting tranches, incentivizing long-term retention rather than immediate liquidity. This type of structure mirrors strategies previously used in Big Tech but represents a new level of scale for OpenAI, whose valuation is poised to reach unprecedented levels in the private market.

Sam Altman announces the bonus plan internally, hours before GPT‑5’s release

The Verge obtained and published the full internal Slack message sent by CEO Sam Altman to staff, confirming the initiative just hours before the company unveiled GPT‑5. In the message, Altman directly acknowledged the increasingly aggressive hiring attempts by competitors such as Meta, xAI, and Google DeepMind. He also emphasized the importance of continuity and stability inside OpenAI’s teams in light of the company’s next-generation research projects and its leadership in applied AI tools.

The message specifically named employees in applied engineering, scaling infrastructure, and safety divisions as primary recipients. These areas are now considered strategic cores in the GPT‑5 development cycle, as well as in the evolution of the entire OpenAI deployment stack used by Microsoft, enterprise partners, and consumer-facing ChatGPT products.

Altman’s statement did not specify the total dollar amount of the initiative, but external estimates suggest it could exceed $750 million in cumulative value when fully vested across the eligible group.

The strategic context: upcoming tender offer and $500 billion private valuation

The timing of the bonuses is closely tied to a new secondary stock offering being prepared by OpenAI’s board and financial backers. According to Business Standard and Ainvest, the new offering may value the company at $500 billion, more than double its previous private valuation. In this context, the bonus structure serves a dual purpose: it strengthens internal loyalty while providing an incentive for employees to remain through the offering and long-term roadmap execution.

Several investors have noted that OpenAI’s current success — including reaching 700 million weekly users, the public release of GPT‑5, and the growing adoption of ChatGPT and Copilot integrations — is making employee retention not just important, but urgent. Losing key engineers to competitors would pose a serious risk to both infrastructure continuity and the training pipelines of future GPT iterations, including GPT‑5.5 and the long-rumored open pretraining projects.

The distribution method balances equity, cash, and optionality

From a financial engineering standpoint, the structure of the bonus is particularly notable. Employees are not required to accept stock; they may opt for cash disbursements, making the offering attractive even for those with lower risk tolerance or less interest in long-term equity growth. However, those who do choose equity may benefit from a substantial upside if the $500B valuation is met or exceeded in the tender offer or future IPO scenarios.

The bonuses will not affect standard salary structures, annual raises, or ongoing promotion cycles. This separation is meant to avoid disruption to OpenAI’s normal compensation policy, while still providing an extraordinary reward tied to market dynamics and loyalty.

The competitive pressure: Meta and DeepMind are escalating their hiring efforts

Behind OpenAI’s decision lies a broader competitive dynamic playing out across the AI industry. Meta, through its FAIR division and Llama research team, has intensified its hiring over the past quarter, often approaching OpenAI researchers with offers including guaranteed cash, rapid promotion, and more flexible research mandates. DeepMind has followed a similar route by repositioning itself around Gemini and expanding its London and Zurich teams with aggressive compensation packages.

This environment, described by one insider as a “silent hiring war,” is placing pressure on all top-tier AI labs to protect their core innovation talent. OpenAI’s response — combining financial incentives, long-term lock-ins, and internal communications transparency — is now seen as a benchmark for how to maintain AI leadership while navigating market pressure.

More than a compensation strategy: signaling confidence ahead of global expansion

While most analysis has focused on the bonuses themselves, the broader implication is reputational. By proactively offering millions in loyalty compensation ahead of market movements, OpenAI is signaling to external investors, enterprise partners, and public stakeholders that it has full confidence in its strategic roadmap — both in terms of model capabilities and organizational culture.

In fact, this program marks a pivot away from performance-only incentives toward strategic organizational preservation. With the release of GPT‑5, the beginning of deeper international rollouts (including new EU and Japan support), and the introduction of multi-agent orchestration in ChatGPT, the continuity of OpenAI’s internal teams has become not just a logistical matter, but a strategic one.

The bonus initiative, confirmed and executed within the same week as GPT‑5’s release, suggests that OpenAI is entering a new phase: no longer just innovating in public, but protecting its future from within.

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