OpenAI to Meta was the widest corridor — 10 of 36 frontier-lab moves since January 2025
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.”
36 documented direct researcher moves between frontier AI labs from January 2025 through October 12, 2026 — 18 in 2025 and 18 in 2026 — drawn from a broader candidate ledger of 147 reported claims, kept only when sources were coherent and corroborated. Meta posted the largest net intake (+13), while Google DeepMind (−9) and OpenAI (−8) were the biggest net losers.
Who left which lab, and where they landed
Left lab on the left, joining lab on the right; ribbon width is the number of researchers. Hover a ribbon or lab for the names.
What the flow cannot say alone
Four researchers moved twice: Barret Zoph, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz left Thinking Machines Lab for OpenAI in January 2026, and Zoph and Metz moved again in August — to Google DeepMind and Meta. markets.businessinsider.com
June 2025 alone saw 11 arrivals at Meta, nine of them from OpenAI, including Lucas Beyer, Trapit Bansal and Shengjia Zhao. aibase.com
The flow reversed in 2026: Anthropic gained 9 researchers and lost only one, including Nobel laureate John Jumper from Google DeepMind in June 2026. markets.businessinsider.com
Andrew Tulloch also moved twice — Thinking Machines Lab to Meta in October 2025, then Meta to Anthropic in September 2026. techbuzz.ai
The ledger, month by month
Month
Researcher
Left
Joined
Source
Method: 36 direct employment moves between organizations actively developing frontier general-purpose models, January 2025 – October 12, 2026, curated from an overinclusive 147-row candidate ledger plus two corroborating research ledgers; lab names normalized (Meta variants to Meta, Google variants to Google DeepMind); when a move was restated under several months, the earliest well-supported joining month is shown; one-source claims, false historical dates (e.g. 2024 moves redated), non-research staff and non-frontier startups were cut.