Talent flows into Meta dominate 2025, then the traffic turns two-way and Google DeepMind bleeds to 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 public-record scan through 14 September 2026 surfaced 52 source-supported move records; consolidating duplicate announcement-vs-start dates and lab-name variants leaves 35 distinct researcher moves across 8 labs from February 2025 to September 2026. These are documented moves from public reporting — not all employee turnover, and no official registry of frontier-lab personnel exists.

Where researchers went

Flow thickness = number of documented moves. Left: lab left. Right: lab joined. Hover a ribbon for the names behind it.

Moves per month

Documented moves by publicly reported move/announcement month, February 2025 – September 2026. Blue = joined Meta, dark = left Google DeepMind, grey = all other moves.

13 of the 35 moves run OpenAI → Meta, and 11 of those land in June–July 2025 as Meta staffed its Superintelligence Labs — including Shengjia Zhao, named its chief scientist. imaginepro.ai

June 2026 brings a cluster of five Google DeepMind exits: four to Anthropic — including Nobel laureate John M. Jumper of AlphaFold, the most-covered move in the scan with 131 sources — and Noam Shazeer to OpenAI. edgen.tech

The traffic turns two-way in 2026: Meta itself loses four researchers, among them Ruoming Pang back to OpenAI a year after joining, and Thinking Machines Lab loses four to OpenAI, led by Barret Zoph and Lilian Weng. select.keenable.ai

Andrej Karpathy's May 2026 move from OpenAI to Anthropic is the only OpenAI→Anthropic move besides safety researcher Andrea Vallone's in December 2025. theagenttimes.com

Every documented move

Chronological. Type to filter by researcher, lab, or note.

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Role / note	Source

Method: 52 candidate move records from a public-web scan of reporting through 2026-09-14, each backed by at least two corroborating pages in the underlying scan (a few by one independent host after syndication). Lab names normalized (Meta/Meta AI/Meta Superintelligence Labs → Meta; Google → Google DeepMind for frontier-model roles; Thinking Machines → Thinking Machines Lab) and duplicate reports of the same person and route consolidated to the month with the strongest sourcing, leaving 35 moves. Month is the publicly reported move or announcement month, not a verified start date. Genuine return or onward moves are kept separate. This is a documented-move census, not exhaustive turnover.

This report was generated automatically by Keenable SELECT at a user's request, from publicly available web sources linked herein. Keenable does not review, verify, or endorse its contents and makes no representation as to accuracy, completeness, or timeliness; AI-based extraction may contain errors. Nothing in this report is investment, legal, financial, or other professional advice. All trademarks and referenced content remain the property of their respective owners; no affiliation or endorsement is implied. To report an error, rights concern, or request removal: legal@keenable.ai.