Meta's 2025 hiring wave and DeepMind's 2026 exodus dominate 43 moves between frontier AI 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.”
43 publicly reported direct moves of named researchers between nine frontier AI labs, January 2025 through September 2026. Each move is one researcher leaving one lab for another, dated by the month it was publicly reported.
Meta hired 16 researchers in June–July 2025 alone — 8 from OpenAI, 5 from Google DeepMind, 2 from Anthropic and 1 from xAI — including new chief scientist Shengjia Zhao. reuters.com
In June 2026 Google DeepMind lost five researchers in a single month — four to Anthropic, including Nobel laureate John M. Jumper, and Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI. techcrunch.com
Thinking Machines Lab lost six people over the period, five in January 2026 alone — all five to OpenAI, led by co-founder Barret Zoph. officechai.com
Two moves reversed within months: Ethan Knight went xAI → Meta in July 2025 and back out to OpenAI in August 2025; Tianfu Fu left OpenAI for xAI in October 2025, then joined Google DeepMind in April 2026. winbuzzer.com
Every move, chronologically
Researcher
Lab left
Lab joined
Month
Role
Pages
Source
“Pages” counts corroborating pages found in this search, not necessarily independent confirmations. Moves marked 1 page rest on a single page and are lower confidence.
Best-effort public-web census of direct researcher moves between frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta's frontier-AI orgs, xAI, Microsoft AI, Thinking Machines Lab, Mistral AI, Safe Superintelligence), Jan 2025 – Sep 3 2026. 43 rows, one per researcher–origin–destination move; a person may appear more than once. Month is the month the move was publicly reported. Not an authoritative employee registry; unreported moves are absent.