In a major move just before the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI has announced substantial bonus payouts for around 1,000 employees — roughly one-third of its full-time workforce.
According to The Verge, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman surprised staff with the news via Slack, revealing that researchers and software engineers in applied engineering, scaling, and safety teams will receive quarterly bonuses for the next two years. These can be taken as stock, cash, or a mix of both.
The payouts will vary by role and seniority. Top researchers are set to earn mid-single-digit millions, while engineers will receive hundreds of thousands. Altman cited market dynamics and the growing competition for AI talent as key reasons for the increase.
“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. “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.”
The competition for AI experts has intensified, with tech giants and startups alike offering lucrative incentives. Altman has recently lost several top researchers to Meta, while Elon Musk’s xAI is also aggressively hiring.
Meanwhile, GPT-5 is now available to all users. Plus subscribers get higher usage limits, while Pro subscribers gain access to GPT-5 Pro — an advanced version with extended reasoning for more comprehensive and accurate answers. OpenAI describes GPT-5 as a “unified system” that combines a fast, efficient model for most queries with a deeper reasoning model (GPT-5 Thinking) for complex problems, using a real-time router to determine the best approach.
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