Google DeepMind is the biggest donor in the frontier talent shuffle — 18 of 36 tracked departures 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.”
36 publicly reported researcher moves between eight frontier labs — OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft AI, xAI, Thinking Machines Lab and Apple — from January 2025 through September 2, 2026. “Month” is the month the move was publicly announced or first reported, not necessarily the researcher’s first day. This is a curated public record, not a census.
multi-source reportingsecondary-source onlyself-reported profile / single source
Each dot is one reported move, placed in its announcement month; the curve runs from the lab left to the lab joined. Hover a dot for detail; hover a lab name to isolate its moves.
Where the corridors run
moves per lab-to-lab corridor in this collected dataset
The heaviest corridors are Google DeepMind → Anthropic (7 moves, crowned by AlphaFold Nobel laureate John Jumper in June 2026 — bloomberg.com, 23 corroborating pages) and Google DeepMind → Microsoft AI (6 moves — geekwire.com).
Traffic runs both ways at OpenAI: it lost 9 researchers but regained 7, including Thinking Machines co-founders Barret Zoph and Lilian Weng returning in 2026 — news-factory.app.
Three careers span three or more labs inside 20 months: Barret Zoph (OpenAI → Thinking Machines → OpenAI → Google DeepMind — officechai.com), Xiaohua Zhai (Google DeepMind → OpenAI → Meta — linkedin.com, self-reported) and Tianfu Fu (OpenAI → xAI → Google DeepMind — linkedin.com, self-reported).
Meta hired 7 across the period, including Apple’s head of AI models Ruoming Pang (techcrunch.com) and ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao as Superintelligence Lab chief scientist (reuters.com). This convenience sample supports no industry-wide ranking.
Every tracked move, in order
month = month the move was publicly announced or first reported
Month
Researcher
Left
Joined
Sourcing
Source
Method: broad live-web searches across major news outlets, trade publications, lab and personal profile pages in English, current through 2026-09-02. 46 candidate rows were collected; 36 defensible moves are shown after removing extraction artifacts, duplicates and miscoded months (10 rows cut or merged; one month corrected to match its linked report). “Month” measures public announcement or first report, not start date. Rows backed only by a self-reported profile or a single low-authority outlet are badged and should not be read as independently confirmed. Quiet or undisclosed moves are missing by construction.