57 researchers changed frontier labs since 2025 — OpenAI → Meta is the widest corridor

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. Be extremely thorough.”

Public reporting from January 2025 through September 2, 2026 yields 57 unique completed moves across 13 labs, after reconciling three duplicate month variants in a 60-row candidate table: 29 moves in 2025 and 28 in 2026. “Frontier lab” is applied inclusively — the established frontier developers plus clearly relevant foundation-model teams and new spinouts, shown in amber.

core frontier-to-frontier move move involving an adjacent or newly founded frontier lab. Ribbon width = number of researchers; hover a ribbon for names and months, a lab for ins, outs and top partners.

June 2025 is the largest single wave — 11 moves in one month, driven by Meta’s hiring campaign; January 2026 (7) and June 2026 (5) are the other big clusters. cryptonews.net

Ethan Knight reversed within one month: xAI → Meta AI and Meta AI → OpenAI, both in August 2025. the-decoder.com

Barret Zoph left Thinking Machines Lab for OpenAI in January 2026, then moved on to Google DeepMind in August 2026. tradingkey.com

Ruoming Pang took Apple Foundation Models → Meta AI in July 2025 and Meta AI → OpenAI in February 2026. aicerts.ai

Google DeepMind is the biggest verified net exporter: 6 researchers to Anthropic and 4 to Meta AI, against few reported arrivals. businessinsider.com

Every retained move, month by month

Researcher	Left	Joined	Month	Note	Scope	Basis	Mentions	Source

Data: 60-row candidate table of publicly reported researcher moves between frontier AI labs, January 2025 – September 2, 2026; three duplicate month variants reconciled to 57 unique moves (Daniel Gross kept at 2025-06, Jack Rae at 2025-06, Rohan Anil at 2026-04). Months are exact start dates where a source gave one; otherwise the month a completed hire or departure was publicly announced, per the basis column. Supporting mentions count discovered sources, an evidence-density signal, not a measure of truth. Public reporting is incomplete; private or unannounced moves are not counted.

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