Andrew Tulloch, an AI researcher at Meta’s TBD Lab, is departing the company, according to a Semafor exclusive by Reed Albergotti. To recruit him, Meta reportedly assembled compensation worth $1.5 billion spread across six years, a figure Semafor says has since been disputed. Even a package close to that size would rank among the largest in tech industry history.
Semafor did not report where Tulloch is headed next. The outlet noted he could join another lab at a high salary or raise venture funding for his own startup, comparing the path to those taken by OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever and Google’s Jeff Dean. Those are framed as possibilities, not confirmed plans.
This is a single-outlet report that no other publication has yet corroborated, and Semafor’s own account is built on limited on-the-record detail. Meta has not been quoted confirming the departure or its terms.
Compensation at this scale for individual researchers signals how tight the market for frontier AI talent has become, with labs including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta competing directly for the same small pool of people. Operators hiring research talent should expect retention offers at Meta’s TBD Lab to keep climbing until that supply problem eases.
Reported by Reed Albergotti for Semafor, published as an exclusive on September 9, 2026.
