Facebook-parent Meta ‘struggles’ to keep AI staff despite big salaries, claims report

Facebook-parent Meta is facing a wave of exits from its artificial intelligence (AI) team, as top talent increasingly moves to rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic, according to The SignalFire State of Talent Report – 2025, dated May 20. It says that despite offering salaries of over $2 million a year, Meta is losing skilled AI professionals, reflecting a broader challenge in Big Tech as demand for AI experts surges. The report highlights Anthropic as the leader in retention, holding on to 80% of its AI employees—outpacing peers like DeepMind (78%), OpenAI (67%), and Meta (64%). As per the report, Anthropic’s success is credited to a culture that values independence and encourages open debate, appealing to those frustrated by corporate bureaucracy. It has also managed to hire top talent from tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Stripe—and Meta itself.Venture capitalist Deedy Das recently shared a post on social platform X stating that despite Meta’s high compensation offers, he observed three top-level exits to competitors in just one week.

“Meta is currently offering $2M+/yr in offers for AI talent and still losing them to OpenAI and Anthropic. Heard ~3 such cases this week. The AI talent wars are absolutely ridiculous. Today, Anthropic has the highest ~80% retention 2 years in and is the #1 (large) company top AI researchers wants to go,” he wrote in the post.This comes at a time when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is leading efforts to form a "superintelligence" team of about 50 experts to pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI). Meanwhile, Meta is also reportedly planning a $15 billion investment in Scale AI, a data-labelling company, to deepen its AI capabilities.In April, Joelle Pineau, Meta’s VP of AI Research, stepped down—adding to concerns about Meta’s ability to meet its AI goals, especially with a $65 billion infrastructure push planned for 2025.