Gorman: Apple is trying to prevent iPhone product design engineers from jumping to OpenAI by offering bonuses.

IT Home reports on March 29 that today, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman discussed Apple’s situation with employees jumping to OpenAI in his Power On newsletter.

He revealed that Apple has been trying to stop iPhone product design engineers from moving to OpenAI by offering bonuses. In recent months, Apple executives have grown increasingly frustrated by the situation in which engineers keep defecting to OpenAI. The hardware division of this startup is being led by Evans Hankey, the former Apple design lead, and senior engineering executive Tangdan, and it is actively poaching people from the engineering teams of iPhone manufacturers.

He mentioned that OpenAI has ambitious plans for products centered on artificial intelligence. Jony Ive, who previously served as Apple’s design director, will be involved in shaping the look and user experience of these products. Since last year, the ChatGPT developer has hired away dozens of Apple engineers—who had previously been working on the R&D for iPhone, the Vision Pro headset, audio technology, and essentially nearly all of the company’s hardware and design business.

From a legal standpoint, Apple has limited measures it can take and finds it difficult to stop this trend. Therefore, the company is trying a different strategy: retaining talent. Apple has started offering substantial, advance bonuses to key iPhone product designers—the amounts range from $200,000 to $400,000 (IT Home note: at the current exchange rate, approximately RMB 1.384 million to 2.769 million)—and they are paid out in installments over four years.

Gurman believes Apple’s challenge is that OpenAI is willing to go further by offering equity incentive plans worth millions of dollars in value each year. Apple has the resources to compete with that, but historically it has chosen not to. Right now, it’s still a crucial moment for Apple—it has to prove it remains influential—especially as the company is set to mark its 50th anniversary. There was a time when engineers were even willing to accept lower compensation in order to work there. However, for many people, that era is clearly gone for good.