OpenAI has hired four senior engineers from rival firms to strengthen its back-end infrastructure group, according to an internal Slack message from company co-founder Greg Brockman seen by WIRED. The recruits are David Lau, formerly Tesla’s vice president of software engineering; Uday Ruddarraju, former head of infrastructure engineering at xAI and social-media platform X; Mike Dalton, an infrastructure engineer who also worked at xAI; and Angela Fan, an artificial-intelligence researcher from Meta. Ruddarraju and Dalton helped build Colossus, xAI’s supercomputer that clusters more than 200,000 graphics-processing units, while Lau oversaw key software platforms at Tesla. Lau said the move would let him pursue “safe, well-aligned artificial general intelligence,” and Ruddarraju called OpenAI’s infrastructure program a “moonshot” matching his systems-engineering ambitions. The quartet will join OpenAI’s scaling team, which designs the data-center hardware, networking and low-level code that power training of large foundation models. The group also manages Stargate, a multibillion-dollar venture aimed at building next-generation AI infrastructure for the Microsoft-backed research lab. The hires highlight the escalating talent war among big AI developers. Meta has lured at least seven OpenAI employees this year, prompting OpenAI to review compensation, while Elon Musk—whose companies Tesla and xAI just lost key staff—continues to sue the San Francisco-based firm over its for-profit shift. OpenAI has countersued, underscoring how legal and recruitment battles are running in parallel as the industry races to build ever larger AI systems.