The day before the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman surprised employees with a message in the company’s Slack. He announced that OpenAI would give a “special one-time award” to researchers and software engineers in a handful of orgs, including applied engineering, scaling, and safety. At the same time, OpenAI is gearing up to let more employees cash out millions of their vested stock to investors. OpenAI has never offered such a payout to such a wide swath of employees before. By not giving all of OpenAI the “special” bonus, Altman risks breeding jealousy among his employees who worked nonstop on this week’s launches and were left out.