Meta's 2025 hiring wave dominates 59 frontier-lab researcher moves — then the flow starts running back out

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.”

A best-effort public-web census of 59 publicly reported moves by technical AI researchers between frontier labs, January 2025 through October 13, 2026 — 41 moves in 2025 and 18 in 2026 to date, backed by seven independent source hosts. Where a start month was not public, the announcement month is used and labelled.

Hover a ribbon for the researchers behind it; hover a lab for its ins and outs

Ribbon colour follows the lab the researchers left:OpenAIGoogle DeepMindMetaAnthropicThinking Machines LabxAI

OpenAI → Meta is the single largest route: 14 researchers, half of them in June 2025 alone, including the four reasoning researchers Meta hired in one week. wired.com

Google DeepMind lost 12 researchers to Meta, from research directors to gold-medal IMO researchers poached in July 2025. techcrunch.com

The flow reverses later in the record: 16 researchers left Meta, with Thinking Machines Lab (6) and Anthropic (4) the top destinations, amid reported tension inside the superintelligence push. businessinsider.com

Three researchers moved twice — Barret Zoph, Huiwen Chang and Andrew Tulloch — making them visible on both sides of the diagram. reuters.com

Every reported move, in order

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Basis	Pages	Source

Best-effort public-web census: 59 rows, one per distinct researcher lab-to-lab move, January 2025 – October 13, 2026, gathered from seven independent source hosts; no single URL backs more than five rows. "Frontier lab" is used broadly for organizations or teams building frontier general-purpose foundation models; only technical researchers and research engineers are counted. "Join month" is a reported start month; "announcement month" (27 of 59 rows) is the month the move was reported and is less exact. "Pages" counts corroborating pages found per move; some moves rest on a single public source. This is not a claim of a complete authoritative universe.

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