OpenAI is granting retention bonuses to roughly 1,000 researchers and engineers—about one-third of its workforce—with individual awards ranging from several hundred thousand dollars to multi-million-dollar sums, according to The Information. The cash-and-equity incentives are intended to shore up talent as the company readies the release of its next large language model, GPT-5, and faces intense recruiting pressure from rivals such as Meta and Google. The payouts follow talks reported earlier this year about a secondary share sale that could value the ChatGPT maker at about $500 billion, more than double its last disclosed valuation. The combination of fresh capital and substantial employee rewards underscores Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman’s drive to keep top AI scientists in-house as competition for advanced-model expertise accelerates.