ByteDance offers special stock incentives to AI team to reduce poaching

The TikTok parent is handing out monthly stock option grants worth up to 130,000 options per employee to lock down its Seed AI division.

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Add us on Google by Editorial Team May. 26, 2026

ByteDance has decided that the best defense against losing its AI researchers is a very expensive offense. The TikTok parent company is rolling out a targeted equity incentive program for its Seed AI division, granting core technical staff between 90,000 and 130,000 stock options on a monthly basis, vesting over an 18-month period.

The goal is straightforward: stop rivals from raiding the team responsible for building ByteDance’s large language models and research pipeline. In a Chinese tech sector where AI talent poaching has become something of a contact sport, ByteDance is essentially paying its best people not to pick up the phone when recruiters call.

The numbers behind the retention play

Here’s the thing about stock options: they only work as golden handcuffs if the underlying valuation makes them worth holding. ByteDance has reportedly set the internal valuation for this equity incentive program at $5 billion, which is notably lower than broader market estimates of the company’s worth.

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The monthly grant structure is worth paying attention to as well. Rather than a single lump-sum equity package, ByteDance is distributing options on a rolling basis with an 18-month vesting window. This creates a continuous incentive to stay, since walking away at any point means leaving unvested options on the table.

A $23 billion AI commitment

The retention program doesn’t exist in isolation. ByteDance has planned capital expenditure of $23 billion, roughly RMB 160 billion, for AI investments in 2026. That figure represents an increase from RMB 150 billion in 2025.

More than half of the 2026 budget is earmarked for advanced semiconductor development.

The Seed division at the center of this retention effort was established in 2023 and has been scaling quickly. ByteDance plans to hire around 100 AI professionals in the US by February 2026. The division is responsible for tools like Doubao and Seedance, products that represent ByteDance’s push into generative AI applications.

The talent war landscape

ByteDance isn’t operating in a vacuum here. The competitive dynamics in China’s AI sector have intensified, with companies like Tencent and DeepSeek ramping up their own recruitment efforts.

A DeepSeek researcher named Guo reportedly joined ByteDance’s Seed team, illustrating the kind of talent movement that these equity programs are designed to both capitalize on and defend against. The company has also had to address rumors about excessive compensation packages being offered to recruits.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.