June 25 (Reuters) - Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

has hired three OpenAI researchers to join his

"superintelligence" team, the Wall Street Journal reported on

Wednesday, days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accused the Facebook

owner of trying to poach its employees.

An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the departure of the

three employees from the company, without giving further

details. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for

comment outside regular business hours.

Meta hired Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua

Zhai, who were all working at the ChatGPT-owner's Zurich office,

the WSJ reported, citing sources.

Last week, Altman

said

Meta had offered his employees bonuses of $100 million to

recruit them.

Once recognized as a leader in open-source AI models,

Meta has suffered from staff departures and postponed launches

of new open-source AI models that could rival competing models

from Google, OpenAI, and China's DeepSeek.

"I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest

competitor," Altman had said.

Meta recently hired 28-year-old Scale AI CEO Alexandr

Wang to work on its "superintelligence" efforts. The company

also took a 49% stake for $14.3 billion in Scale AI.

Meta is now trying to paint a turnaround as reports

suggest Zuckerberg is setting up a team of experts to achieve

so-called "artificial general intelligence" (AGI).

(Reporting by Angela Christy and Kanjyik Ghosh in Bengaluru;

Editing by Rashmi Aich and Anil D'Silva)