DeepMind bled in June, OpenAI in August: 20 direct moves between frontier AI labs in 2026

Asked:

"Who moved between the frontier AI labs this year? For each move list the researcher, the lab they left, where they went and the month."

A public-report census of researcher moves between eight frontier labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, Thinking Machines Lab, DeepSeek and ByteDance Seed — from January through September 1, 2026: 20 reported direct moves involving 19 people (Barret Zoph moved twice). Ribbon width is people; hover a ribbon for names and months.

Google DeepMind's June outflow was the year's biggest single event: five departures in one month, four of them to Anthropic — including Nobel laureate John Jumper — plus Noam Shazeer to OpenAI. reuters.com

OpenAI turned from net winner to loser in August: Barret Zoph left for Google DeepMind and Luke Metz and Yang Song for Meta Superintelligence Labs. seattlemetromagazine.com

Barret Zoph appears twice — Thinking Machines Lab to OpenAI in January, then out to Google DeepMind in August — so the 20 moves cover 19 people. nerdstool.com

Thinking Machines Lab lost six people over the year, five of them founders or senior researchers rejoining OpenAI; Lilian Weng closed the loop in July. robotsatlas.com

Five entries rest on a single public report — Denny Zhou (month approximate), Max Schwarzer, Joshua Gross, Guo Daya and Jason Wei — and are flagged rather than dropped. coinlive.com

Every move, in order

Click a header to sort. Confidence reflects corroborating public pages.

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Confidence	Source

Best-effort census of publicly reported direct moves between eight frontier AI labs, January 1 – September 1, 2026: 20 moves, 19 people. Month is when the move was publicly reported or the stated start month; appointments can be announced before start dates, and this is not an HR-complete roster. Duplicate and conflicting secondary reports (alternate months, older affiliations such as Andrej Karpathy's, who arrived at Anthropic from Eureka Labs rather than a frontier lab) were reconciled or excluded. Denny Zhou's month is inferred from a report placing him about four months at Meta by June 18. No confirmed September move as of September 1.

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