Adds OpenAI confirmation on employee departures in paragraph 2; background throughout

June 25 (Reuters) - Meta META.O 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 GOOGL.O, 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)

((AngelaChristy.M@thomsonreuters.com;))