Meta Superintelligence Labs pulled 34 researchers from rival frontier labs, 17 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.”

Open-source reporting across 10 news hosts identified 89 direct lab-to-lab moves by 84 researchers from January 2025 through September 2026 — the latest reported move found by the 2026-10-31 research cutoff. This is a best-effort public-record census, not a complete registry; a researcher appears more than once when they moved more than once.

Where the talent flowed, lab to lab

Ribbon width is the number of corrected move records on each route. Hover a lab or ribbon for the researchers behind it.

Moves per month: June and July 2025 were the peak of the raid

OpenAI → Meta Superintelligence Labs was the single busiest route with 17 moves, and Google DeepMind → Meta added 13 more — Meta absorbed 34 of the 89 recorded moves. reuters.com

Flow later reversed: Meta Superintelligence Labs itself lost 19 recorded researchers, 6 each to Anthropic and OpenAI and 5 to Thinking Machines Lab. businessinsider.com

Thinking Machines Lab churned in both directions — it hired 11 researchers but gave up 10, including co-founders returning to OpenAI. techcrunch.com

41 of 89 records rest on a single reporting host; they are kept but flagged as lower confidence throughout. fortune.com

All 89 corrected moves

only single-host rows

shaded rows are supported by a single reporting host (lower confidence)

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Role at destination	Hosts / sources	Source

Method: best-effort census of publicly reported researcher moves between frontier AI labs, January 2025 – September 2026, compiled from 10 news hosts (research cutoff 2026-10-31); 89 move records across 84 researchers, each row carrying its source link and the count of independent hosts supporting it. Two ambiguous-origin records were corrected against the evidence: John Schulman’s immediate prior lab was Anthropic, so the OpenAI → Thinking Machines row for him was dropped and the Anthropic → Thinking Machines row kept; Huiwen Chang joined Meta from Google Research, so the duplicate OpenAI-origin row was dropped. Month is when the move began or was publicly announced, as reporting disclosed. Private or unreported moves cannot be observed; single-host rows are marked lower confidence rather than hidden.

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