Meta poaches another Apple AI engineer despite AI hiring freeze

Meta’s hiring freeze may not be as airtight as it sounds. Earlier this week, reports emerged that the company had paused recruitment across its artificial intelligence division. Now, Bloomberg reports that Meta has hired another senior researcher from Apple.

Frank Chu, who led Apple AI teams focused on cloud infrastructure, training and search, has joined Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, the newly created hub for Mark Zuckerberg’s push into advanced AI systems. Chu is the sixth Apple AI researcher to defect to Meta in the past seven weeks, following the high-profile hiring of Ruoming Pang, former head of Apple’s foundation models team.

The new hire raises questions about how strict Meta’s hiring freeze really is. The Wall Street Journal had earlier revealed that Meta had halted AI recruitment as part of a broader restructuring, even barring staff from moving between internal teams. A spokesperson at the time framed it as “basic organisational planning” tied to yearly budgeting.

But the exception made for Chu suggests that Zuckerberg is still willing to bring in high-value talent, especially when it strengthens the company’s so-called “AI Superteam.” The contradiction reflects Meta’s dual reality: publicly slowing down hiring while privately escalating its Silicon Valley talent war.

For Apple, the defections add to growing concerns about its AI capabilities. After being pressed on the issue during Apple’s Q3 earnings call, CEO Tim Cook held a company-wide meeting, promising major investments to catch up. Yet the steady outflow of researchers to Meta risks undermining those efforts and fuelling the perception that Apple is lagging behind rivals.

Meanwhile, Meta continues to deal with its own internal challenges. Its AI division has gone through four restructurings in six months, and reports have pointed to cultural clashes and organisational churn. Even so, its willingness to bend its own hiring freeze to snap up Apple talent underscores just how critical the race for AI researchers has become.