ByteDance Issues Seed Stock Options for the First Time, Distributing Special Shares to Prevent Tencent's Poaching

According to Sensing OneMillion monitoring, ByteDance has issued independent stock options for a specific business department for the first time. As reported by the Financial Times, in order to prevent competitors such as Tencent from poaching talent, ByteDance recently granted named "Bean Bag" low-priced special stock options to employees of its AI lab Seed department. This allows employees to directly share the growth dividends of the AI business without being diluted by the equity of different business lines within the group. This stock option scheme is the first time ByteDance has issued special options tied to a single business unit since its founding.

With the intensification of talent competition in the domestic large model field, infrastructure and data annotation have become key battlegrounds. Since establishing the Seed Lab in 2023, ByteDance has become Nvidia's largest customer in China through massive investment in computing infrastructure, attracting a large number of top AI researchers. However, Tencent, which admitted the lag in large model development at the end of 2025, has recently been aggressively poaching talent led by former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu. Recently departed senior members of the Seed Vision Platform, Xiao Xuefeng, and infrastructure expert Zhang Chi, have both joined Tencent.

To counteract the talent poaching, ByteDance has provided global Seed employees with the option to subscribe to Bean Bag special stock at $13 per share this month, nearly a 30% increase from $10 per share at the end of 2025. This increase reflects advancements in Bean Bag's large model commercialization and model performance. Although the stock option mechanism can provide substantial potential returns, there are also internal controversies within the organization. Some insiders revealed that the Seed Lab team has grown to 2,000 people, facing challenges of bureaucratization and fragmented responsibilities within the internal organizational structure. In comparison, Tencent's AI team is smaller and has committed to offering broader autonomy, management responsibilities, and more attractive compensation packages to researchers. Apart from Tencent, DeepSeek is also under intense talent competition pressure, currently raising initial funding from investors to retain its core team. ByteDance successfully poached several core infrastructure members of DeepSeek in 2025.