56 documented researcher moves since 2025: Meta hired 19, then leaked to Thinking Machines and OpenAI, while Google DeepMind lost a June 2026 wave to Anthropic
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 census of publicly documented direct employer changes among frontier-lab research scientists and engineers, January 2025 through 27 September 2026: 56 high-confidence moves across 9 labs, distilled from 71 machine-collected candidate reports. Private or unannounced moves are absent; the month is the stated start or departure month where available, otherwise the first public announcement month.
Ribbons flow from the lab left (left side) to the lab joined (right side); width is number of researchers. Hover a ribbon or a lab for the names behind it.
Meta was the biggest net recruiter — 19 joins against 16 exits — with 12 hires straight out of OpenAI, most in the June–July 2025 superintelligence push. wired.com
Thinking Machines Lab both drained and refilled: 11 researchers joined it, but by 2026 it had sent 4 back to OpenAI — including founding hires Barrett Zoph, Luke Metz and Lilian Weng — and 4 more to Meta. builtin-com.translate.goog
Google DeepMind lost 9 researchers and regained only 1; five left in June 2026 alone, four of them — including Nobel laureate John Jumper — to Anthropic, and Noam Shazeer to OpenAI. bloomberg.com
Anthropic gained 10 researchers and lost just 1 (John Schulman, to Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025) — the best retention ratio of any lab in the set. futuresearch.ai
All 56 moves, chronological
Month
Researcher
Left
Joined
Research context
Source
Public-report census of direct employer transitions among frontier-lab research staff (organizations training frontier-scale general-purpose foundation models), 2025-01-01 to 2026-09-27. 56 moves retained from 71 machine-collected candidate rows after review: lab names canonicalized (Meta, Google DeepMind, Microsoft AI), duplicates and stale or indirect transitions removed, three researcher-name spellings corrected. Month is the stated start/departure month where available, otherwise first announcement month. Sources span 38 hosts; retained moves generally have at least two independent supporting hosts. Advisers, investors, product hires and nontechnical executives excluded. Not a guaranteed exhaustive roster.