Meta pulled 24 researchers from rival frontier labs, then the current reversed
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.”
47 publicly reported researcher moves between frontier AI labs, January 2025 through October 2026, drawn from 17 news hosts. Each row is one researcher leaving one lab for another, dated by the earliest public-report month. Public reporting is not a closed universe, so this is a best-effort list, not every private or unreported move.
Ribbon width = number of move rows. Left: lab departed. Right: lab joined. Hover a ribbon for the researchers behind it.
Meta's June–August 2025 recruiting wave accounts for 18 of its 24 arrivals, led by the four-researcher OpenAI reasoning-team hire reported by techcrunch.com.
Google is the biggest donor lab at 19 departures across six destinations, including gold-medal researchers poached by Meta per markets.businessinsider.com.
The direction partly reversed in 2026: Thinking Machines Lab lost seven researchers to OpenAI, Meta and xAI after seeding its 2025 team from OpenAI, per techcrunch.com.
Corroboration varies widely: some rows rest on one strong report while the biggest Meta hires show up on 18 hosts, as in wired.com's coverage of the Jason Wei move.
Every move, chronologically
Month
Researcher
Left
Joined
Hosts*
Mentions*
Source
* Corroborating hosts and source mentions are discovery and corroboration indicators from web search, not measures of truth or importance.
Method: 47 publicly reported researcher moves between frontier labs (broadly defined: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, Cohere, Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Lab, Microsoft AI and credible new frontier-model labs), January 2025 – October 2, 2026, gathered by web discovery and semantic extraction across thousands of search results from 17 source hosts; no single URL supports more than 8.6% of rows. Month is the earliest public-report month, not necessarily the start date. Hands-on researchers and technical research leaders only; business, recruiting and policy moves excluded. Conflicting retrospective affiliations canonicalized where possible.