Meta raided OpenAI in mid-2025, then Anthropic drained Google DeepMind a year later

Which AI researchers moved between frontier labs since 2025 — who left where, joined where, and in what month?

43 publicly reported lab-to-lab moves by 38 researchers, February 2025 through August 2026, across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, Thinking Machines Lab and Apple's foundation-model team.

OpenAI→Meta is the single biggest route — 12 of the 43 moves, ten of them in June–July 2025 alone. techcrunch.com

In June 2026 Anthropic took five researchers from Google DeepMind in one month, including John Jumper, while Noam Shazeer went to OpenAI. aioapex.com

Thinking Machines Lab hired five founding researchers in February 2025 and lost seven people from late 2025 on — four of them back to OpenAI, including Lilian Weng and Barret Zoph. techcrunch.com

Barret Zoph moved three times — OpenAI to Thinking Machines, back to OpenAI, then to Google DeepMind in August 2026. edgen.tech

Every reported move

Click a header to sort. Badge shows corroborating pages; one-source rows are marked lower-confidence.

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Evidence	Source

Public-reporting census of frontier-lab-to-frontier-lab researcher moves: 43 rows, one per move, assembled from web reporting current through 30 August 2026. Month is the reported/announced or effective month as stated by the source; the census is likely incomplete and one-source rows are lower confidence. The Soumith Chintala November 2025 row is timing-unverified. "Frontier lab" means organizations directly developing general-purpose frontier models.