110 researcher moves since 2025: Meta and Thinking Machines pulled hardest, then 2026 turned multidirectional
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.”
Public reporting surfaced 110 candidate moves between frontier labs — organizations actively building state-of-the-art general-purpose foundation models, including serious newly formed labs — from January 2025 through September 2026, drawn from 56 distinct source hosts. This is a best-effort public-record census, not a complete HR ledger: unreported moves are absent, and 49 rows rest on a single source host, labelled single-source below. The month shown is the joining month or, failing that, the month the move was first firmly announced.
Every move, origin to destination
Each line is one researcher's move. Colour is timing:20252026. Hover or tap a line for the researcher and story; filters below also drive the table.
The February 2025 launch of Thinking Machines Lab pulled 14 announced moves in one month, nearly all from OpenAI, including founder Mira Murati and chief scientist John Schulman. todaysstartupnews.com
Meta absorbed the most talent overall — 38 of 110 moves, 25 of them in 2025, peaking with 19 reported moves across labs in July 2025 during its superintelligence hiring push. forbes.com
OpenAI is the biggest source of departures (40 moves out) yet also took in 15 researchers, including Luke Metz returning from Thinking Machines Lab in January 2026. en.wikipedia.org
2026 spread out: 51 moves landed across ten destinations, with Anthropic (13) and OpenAI (10) matching Meta (13), versus 2025's concentration in Meta and Thinking Machines Lab (45 of 59). techcrunch.com
The full roster
Month
Researcher
Left
Joined
Detail
Confidence
Source
Best-effort census of publicly reported researcher moves between frontier AI labs, January 2025 – September 24, 2026: 110 deduplicated candidate moves from 56 distinct source hosts; no single URL backs more than 6 rows. Month is the joining month or the month the move was first firmly announced. Rows backed by one host are marked single-source; repeat movers appear as separate rows. Privately made or unreported moves are absent. Move detail text is truncated on phones for space.