OpenAI to Meta is the busiest corridor: 12 of 27 reported researcher moves between frontier labs since 2025
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.”
This best-effort public-record census covers 27 publicly reported moves between frontier AI labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Cohere and Thinking Machines Lab — from January 2025 through 28 August 2026, drawn from 14 independent source hosts. It is a documented minimum: quiet moves that were never publicly reported are not counted.
Where researchers left and where they landed
Ribbon width = reported moves on that route. Blue = 2025, orange = 2026, grey = month unresolved. Hover a ribbon or lab for names.
Moves by month
June 2025 peaked at 9 reported moves; one move (Zhiqing Sun, OpenAI→Meta) has no reliably resolved month and is shown separately.
June 2025 alone carried 9 of the 27 moves, eight of them into Meta — including three Zurich-office researchers hired from OpenAI in one week (
reuters.com).
In 2026 the flow turned toward Anthropic: 4 of its 6 reported hires came from Google DeepMind, including Nobel laureate John Jumper in June 2026 (
bloomberg.com,
techcrunch.com).
Thinking Machines Lab was both a destination and a source: it hired Soumith Chintala from Meta in February 2025, then lost co-founders Andrew Tulloch to Meta and Barret Zoph (with Luke Metz) back to OpenAI (
en.wikipedia.org).
One of the 12 OpenAI→Meta moves, Zhiqing Sun's, has no reliably resolved month in public reporting, so its month is left blank rather than guessed (
semasocial.com).
Method: best-effort census of publicly reported researcher moves between frontier AI labs, 27 rows, January 2025 – 28 August 2026, compiled from 14 independent source hosts; the largest single URL supports 3 of 27 rows (11.1%). “Month” is the reported or announced month when the exact start month was unavailable; one move has no resolved month and is left blank. Counts are reported moves, not an official employee ledger — unreported moves are excluded by construction.