94 corroborated researcher moves since 2022 trace five waves — ending in 2025's rush to Meta and 2026's flow back to OpenAI and Anthropic

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.”

Asked (follow-up):

“and since 2022?”

The corrected list holds 94 publicly corroborated moves between frontier labs from January 2022 through November 2026 — 28 before 2025 and 66 after — across 36 independent source hosts. This is a conservative public-source reconstruction, not a census of unannounced hiring; “month” is the month a move was announced, started, or the destination lab was publicly launched (founding teams especially).

Moves per quarter — the five waves

The 2022 wave was a founding exodus from DeepMind and Meta into Inflection AI and Cohere — 5 moves including Karén Simonyan and Phil Blunsom. cnbc.com

2023 was the formation year: Meta's Llama authors founded Mistral AI (4 moves) and Google DeepMind supplied 7 of xAI's founding team, consolidated here under its July 2023 public launch. fortune.com

2025 is the single biggest year, with 46 moves — the OpenAI→Meta corridor alone carried 16 researchers and Google DeepMind→Meta another 10 during the Superintelligence Labs hiring surge. reuters.com

2026 shows reversals: 5 Thinking Machines researchers returned to OpenAI, and Anthropic drew Google DeepMind veterans including John Jumper and Andrej Karpathy. wired.com

All 94 corrected moves

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Role	Source

Data: 94 corrected researcher moves between frontier labs, Jan 2022 – Nov 2026, reconstructed from public reporting (97 raw candidate rows plus an 87-row historical cross-check; duplicates merged, one unconfirmed Meta→Anthropic row omitted, one well-sourced Jan 2026 Thinking Machines→OpenAI move restored). A row is one researcher's announced move; lab names normalized (Meta AI→Meta, Google→Google DeepMind, Microsoft Research→Microsoft AI). Founding-team months use the destination lab's public launch. Source and host counts retained per row; roles trimmed for space.

This report was generated automatically by Keenable SELECT at a user's request, from publicly available web sources linked herein. Keenable does not review, verify, or endorse its contents and makes no representation as to accuracy, completeness, or timeliness; AI-based extraction may contain errors. Nothing in this report is investment, legal, financial, or other professional advice. All trademarks and referenced content remain the property of their respective owners; no affiliation or endorsement is implied. To report an error, rights concern, or request removal: legal@keenable.ai.