Meta and Thinking Machines absorbed most 2025 frontier-lab departures — then the flow reversed toward OpenAI and Anthropic in 2026
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-source census of 69 corroborated moves by 62 researchers between frontier AI labs, from January 2025 through the cutoff of 18 October 2026. Month is the publicly reported announcement or start month; duplicate reports of the same move are collapsed to one row, and each row names the person's immediate prior employer.
Flow from lab left (left side) to lab joined (right side); ribbon width = number of researchers. Hover a ribbon for the names.
June–September 2025: Meta's Superintelligence push took 23 researchers in 2025 alone, 15 of them straight from OpenAI — including Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Hongyu Ren and Lucas Beyer. reuters.com
Thinking Machines Lab launched on ex-OpenAI talent in early 2025, then lost co-founders Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, Sam Schoenholz and Lilian Weng back to OpenAI in 2026. techcrunch.com
Mid-2026 brought a Google DeepMind exodus: Nobel laureate John M. Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel and Arthur Conmy joined Anthropic, while Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer went to OpenAI. ft.com
Some researchers moved twice: Andrew Tulloch went OpenAI → Thinking Machines → Meta → Anthropic, and Yann LeCun left Meta to found Advanced Machine Intelligence. reuters.com
All 69 moves
Month
Researcher
Lab left
Lab joined
Destination role
Source
Best-effort public-source census, not a complete HR record. 69 corroborated moves (62 researchers) between frontier AI labs, 2025-01-01 to cutoff 2026-10-18, reconciled from a 59-row multi-source candidate list (minimum three corroborating hosts) and a 73-row higher-authority audit set (Reuters, FT, Wired, TechCrunch, official lab pages); duplicates collapsed, immediate employer preferred over older affiliations, Meta entities normalized to "Meta" and Google frontier teams to "Google DeepMind". Month is the publicly reported announcement or start month. Internal transfers, advisory roles, Apple, academia and non-research executives excluded.