Meta pulled 19 researchers from rival frontier labs — 11 from OpenAI alone

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......”

40 unique, publicly corroborated researcher moves between frontier-model labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft AI, Apple's foundation-model group and Thinking Machines Lab — from January 2025 through September 9, 2026. One duplicate row (Andrew Tulloch, listed under two spellings of Thinking Machines Lab) was merged. Every move was corroborated across at least two web hosts.

Moves by month

Meta hired 19 researchers in this window — nearly half of all moves — including 11 from OpenAI, the single biggest corridor. reuters.com

Google DeepMind lost the most people: 18 departures, split across Microsoft (7), Meta (6), Anthropic (4) and OpenAI (1). fortune.com

June and July 2025 each saw 10 moves — half the whole census in two months, driven by Meta's superintelligence push. wired.com

A second cluster of 5 moves landed in June 2026, showing the churn continued a year after the summer 2025 wave. techcrunch.com

Every move

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Specialty	Source

Systematic public-reporting census of researcher moves between frontier-model labs, January 2025 – September 9, 2026; scan run September 9, 2026 over thousands of URL-deduplicated news and search results. 40 unique moves (41 rows; one naming duplicate merged). Month is the public announcement or reporting month when a start month was unavailable; each move corroborated across at least two distinct hosts; one representative source linked per row. Undisclosed moves may be missing.

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