Anthropic pulled the most frontier-lab researchers in 2026, drawing 15 of 30 documented moves

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.”

30 documented direct moves between frontier AI labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta’s frontier-model teams, xAI and Thinking Machines Lab — from January through September 2026. These are documented moves found in public reporting and professional-profile results through 14 September 2026, not a guaranteed census: moves disclosed only privately or not indexed on the public web may be missing. Two researchers moved twice and appear once per move.

Where researchers left and where they landed

Flow width = number of documented moves. Colour = the lab the researcher left. Hover a ribbon for the names behind it; hover a lab for its ins, outs and net. Month buttons filter the diagram.

Month by month: June was the busiest, with 8 moves

Anthropic gained 15 researchers and lost none among documented moves — including Nobel laureate John Jumper from Google DeepMind in June. markets.businessinsider.com

Thinking Machines Lab lost 7 people and its January exodus sent five straight back to OpenAI, led by Barrett Zoph, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz. fortune.com

Barrett Zoph and Luke Metz each moved twice: back to OpenAI in January, then out again in August to Google DeepMind and Meta respectively. markets.businessinsider.com

OpenAI counter-poached Meta in February, taking Ruoming Pang — the ex-Apple models head — and Pengchuan Zhang within a week. reuters.com

All 30 documented moves

Month	Researcher	Lab left	Lab joined	Source

Data: 30 documented direct moves between frontier AI labs, January–September 2026, deduplicated from a registry of 50 candidate rows spanning 30 source hosts and cross-checked against Reuters, Fortune, TechCrunch and Business Insider reporting; scan of public reporting and professional profiles through 2026-09-14. Each move counts one person changing immediate employer; earlier employers (Apple, Tesla), rumours and business hires were cut. Months follow the dated announcement or profile start month.

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