Talent flows out of Google DeepMind and OpenAI dominate the AI lab job market

Asked:

“Which AI researchers moved between AI labs?”

A conservative, source-supported shortlist of 56 researcher-move records across 21 origin→destination corridors between 13 AI labs, assembled from a live-web scan on 1 September 2026. Every record required at least two distinct source-page mentions; link width below counts named researchers per corridor.

Left: lab departed. Right: lab joined. Link width = named researchers. Hover a ribbon for the names; hover a lab for its ins and outs. Colours identify the origin lab.

Google DeepMind is the largest documented exporter of talent: 21 departure records across 5 corridors, led by 11 named researchers to Microsoft AI — including Mustafa Suleyman and Amar Subramanya. cnbc.com

Meta AI is the biggest documented importer, adding 20 named researchers from five different labs — 10 of them from OpenAI, including Shengjia Zhao as chief scientist. mirrorreview.com

Some moves are round trips: Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz left Thinking Machines Lab and returned to OpenAI, while John Schulman went the other way. frontierbeat.com

Anthropic drew senior scientists from four labs, including Nobel laureate John Jumper and Andrej Karpathy — the corridor from Google DeepMind carries the most source mentions of any (56). aidb.digital

Every corridor, every name

The 56 individual moves

Person	From	To	Destination role	Sources	Evidence

Method: live-web research conducted 2026-09-01. Several thousand URL-deduplicated results were screened through broad, official-source, and major-news searches; inclusion required at least two distinct source-page mentions. 21 corridor rows and 56 person-move records shown; counts are documented named moves found in this scan, not lab headcount or a claim of completeness. Founding a new lab after leaving another counts as a move; some people appear more than once (sequential moves); lab branding is canonicalized (Meta / Meta AI / Meta Superintelligence Labs as Meta AI). “Sources” is the number of distinct URLs found per person-move; linked URLs are representative and often secondary reports — follow them to judge the evidence. One-source candidates were cut.

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