29 researchers moved between the frontier AI labs in 2026 — Anthropic and OpenAI took the most

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“who moved between the ai frontier labs this year”

Public web reporting through September 24, 2026 names 29 direct moves between frontier-model developers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Thinking Machines Lab and xAI — after consolidating duplicate organization labels and duplicate reports of the same move. Every retained move is backed by at least two independent sources; the list covers named, publicly reported moves only, so unreported hires are not counted.

Ribbon color shows the destination lab. Ribbon width is the number of people. Hover a ribbon or a lab for names.

Broader affiliation change, not counted: Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic’s pretraining team in May 2026. OpenAI was a historical rather than immediately previous affiliation, so he is flagged here instead of being counted among the 29 direct moves (axios.com).

Announced	Person	From	To	Previous role	New role	Source

Method: 38 source-backed route records collected from public web reporting through 2026-09-24, consolidated to 29 direct person-moves by merging alternate organization labels (Google/Google DeepMind, Meta/Meta Superintelligence Labs) and duplicate reports of the same event; dates given only as month/year are treated as month-level. Each retained move has at least two URLs on at least two independent hosts; one representative source is shown. Andrej Karpathy’s OpenAI→Anthropic change is excluded from the count as a non-direct move. Roles are truncated for space.

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