Sixteen jumps between frontier labs: Thinking Machines fed OpenAI in January, Google DeepMind bled five stars in June

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-reporting census of researcher moves directly between frontier AI labs, January through 1 September 2026: 16 moves by 14 people across six organizations, dated by the month each move was publicly reported. Barret Zoph and Luke Metz each moved twice.

Ribbon colour = month reported: JanuaryMarchAprilJuneJulyAugust

Four Thinking Machines Lab co-founders and researchers went to OpenAI in one January wave — Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, Sam Schoenholz and Lia Guy — indianexpress.com

Google DeepMind lost five researchers in June alone, including Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic and Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI — bloomberg.com

Barret Zoph moved twice: Thinking Machines → OpenAI in January, then OpenAI → Google DeepMind in August, five months after arriving — techcrunch.com

Luke Metz also jumped twice, landing at Meta Superintelligence Labs in August; Anthropic was the biggest net gainer of the year at +6 — edgen.tech

All 16 moves, in order of public report

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Note	Source

Best-effort census of publicly reported direct moves between frontier AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta Superintelligence Labs, Thinking Machines Lab, xAI), 1 Jan – 1 Sep 2026: 16 moves by 14 people, vetted from 169 candidate extraction rows across four result sets; duplicates, speculative destinations, departures without a confirmed destination, and indirect moves (e.g. Andrej Karpathy, whose prior employer was Eureka Labs) were cut. Months are the month of public announcement or report, not inferred start dates. Arthur Conmy and Devendra Chaplot are less extensively corroborated than the major moves. This is public reporting, not private HR data.

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