Fifty researcher moves since 2025: Meta Superintelligence Labs pulled 19 in, then Thinking Machines Lab started losing its founders
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.”
Through 15 October 2026, public reporting corroborated by at least two independent source hosts yields 50 lab-to-lab moves by 46 named AI researchers or research leaders, spanning February 2025 to July 2026. Four people moved twice. This is a best-effort public-record census, not a claim that no unreported moves occurred.
Filter:
Ribbon thickness = number of moves. Dark ribbons flow into Meta Superintelligence Labs; mid-grey ribbons leave Thinking Machines Lab; light ribbons are all other flows. Hover a ribbon for the researchers behind it.
Of Meta Superintelligence Labs' 19 hires, 16 landed in June–July 2025 alone — 11 of them pulled straight from OpenAI. reuters.com
Thinking Machines Lab took in 6 researchers in February 2025, then lost 6 — co-founder Andrew Tulloch to Meta in October 2025, and five more (four back to OpenAI in January 2026, Lilian Weng in July 2026). techcrunch.com
Microsoft AI quietly built a 10-person pipeline: 7 hires from Google DeepMind across 2025, then 3 senior leaders from the Allen Institute for AI in March 2026. windowsforum.com
Lilian Weng, Luke Metz, Barrett Zoph and Andrew Tulloch each moved twice — all four left OpenAI for Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025, and all four later left it again. remio.ai
All 50 moves, chronologically
Month
Researcher
Left
Joined
Role / specialty
Hosts
Source
Method: public-record census of researcher moves between frontier AI labs, 1 January 2025 through 15 October 2026. 50 corroborated moves by 46 named researchers; each move required at least two independent source hosts and evidence of a completed or publicly announced move between distinct organizations developing frontier foundation models. "Month" is when the move happened or was announced, whichever reporting established. "Hosts" counts independent corroborating source hosts. One duplicate path was corrected: John Schulman's direct origin is Anthropic, not OpenAI. Roles are shown where reported; unreported moves may exist.