Meta's mid-2025 raid on OpenAI is the biggest corridor in 52 tracked researcher moves between frontier labs

Asked:

“Which AI researchers moved between frontier labs since 2025? For each move list the researcher, the lab they left, where they went and the month.”

An open-web scan through 2026-09-08 yielded 52 source-backed researcher–origin–destination–month records across 11 labs, January 2025 to July 2026, drawn from 25 source hosts. This is an evidence-based roster of reported moves, not an official exhaustive registry; nine researcher–corridor pairs appear in two or three nearby months and are flagged as date-source conflicts, not separate job changes.

Where 52 researchers went: flows between labs, 2025-01 to 2026-07

Ribbon width = number of tracked move records. Colour by origin lab. Hover a ribbon for the researchers behind it; hover a lab for its ins and outs.

Moves per month

Records per reported move/announcement month. June 2025 (15) is Meta's OpenAI wave; June 2026 (7) is the Google→Anthropic/OpenAI wave.

Findings

OpenAI→Meta is the largest corridor at 16 records, almost all in June–July 2025 as Meta built its superintelligence lab — reuters.com

Google lost 21 recorded researchers, 10 of them to Anthropic — including Nobel laureate John Jumper and AlphaFold contributor Jonas Adler — cryptobriefing.com

Thinking Machines Lab appears on both sides: a destination-adjacent player that sent 3 researchers to OpenAI and others to Meta and xAI — finance.biggo.com

Meta is a net gainer (28 in, 3 out) but also lost researchers to Microsoft AI, Cohere, Anthropic and OpenAI in late 2025 — techbuzz.ai

All 52 records, chronological

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Role context	Src	Source

Src = number of sources backing the record; 1 means single-sourced. “dup?” marks a researcher–corridor pair reported in more than one month (date-source conflict, likely one move).

Open-web scan of reported researcher moves between frontier AI labs, 52 records, January 2025 through cutoff 2026-09-08 (latest reported month 2026-07), from 25 primary-source hosts; the most-used primary URL backs 10 of 52 rows. Each row is one extracted researcher–origin–destination–month record with its reported move/announcement month; duplicate nearby-month reports of the same researcher and corridor are kept and flagged rather than merged. Supporting URLs were cut for space; one primary link is shown per row.

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