The 2025 talent rush ran to Meta: 17 of 47 tracked frontier-lab moves landed there, 12 straight from OpenAI
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.”
47 publicly reported, source-verifiable researcher moves between frontier AI labs, January 2025 through October 2026 (latest reported month: August 2026), drawn from 9 cited news hosts. These are publicly identifiable moves only — no authoritative complete universe of private personnel changes exists.
Where researchers left and where they landed
Ribbon width = number of moves. Orange = moves into Meta; grey = all other routes. Hover a ribbon for the researchers behind it.
Moves by month — the June–July 2025 spike
Dark bars = 2025 moves, light-blue bars = 2026. Hover a bar for names.
June 2025 alone saw 12 identified moves — a quarter of the whole set — nearly all into Meta’s new superintelligence effort.
techcrunch.comThinking Machines Lab was the second-biggest magnet: 5 researchers came from OpenAI and others from Anthropic and Meta, before 4 later returned to OpenAI.
wired.comTraffic was not one-way: OpenAI itself took in 9 identified arrivals, including 3 from Meta and 4 back from Thinking Machines Lab.
wired.comGoogle DeepMind lost 10 identified researchers — 5 to Meta, 3 to Anthropic — while only one move went in the opposite direction.
techcrunch.com
Method: 47 publicly reported researcher moves between frontier AI labs, one row per move, January 2025 – October 2026 research window; counts are moves, not headcount. Compiled from 9 cited news hosts; the most-used single URL supports 8.5% of rows, and some rows rest on a single publication. Lab names normalized to the parent frontier lab (Meta’s superintelligence unit counted as Meta); newly founded labs kept distinct. Nothing cut.