Meta AI's June–July 2025 raid dominates 64 frontier-lab researcher moves

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.

A public-record scan found 64 reported researcher moves between frontier-model labs from January 2025 through the research cutoff of 5 September 2026. It is a census of publicly reported moves, not a complete HR ledger: unreported moves cannot be observed, and for a few lower-confidence rows the month is when the move was reported rather than the exact start date.

Moves per month, colored by destination lab

Each cell is one researcher — hover for the name and route

Where researchers left and where they landed

All 17 routes, ribbon width = number of moves

OpenAI → Meta AI is the biggest route with 16 moves, and Google DeepMind → Meta AI follows with 13 — together nearly half the dataset. news.bloomberglaw.com

June 2025 is the peak month with 15 moves and July 2025 adds 12 — the Meta superintelligence hiring surge. gadgets360.com

The 2026 pattern reverses: of 19 moves in 2026, six left Thinking Machines Lab and six left Google DeepMind, with departures outnumbering arrivals at both. fortune.com

Microsoft AI built its lab almost entirely from Google DeepMind, taking all six of its recorded hires from there in February–June 2025. qz.com

All 64 moves

Researcher	From	To	Month	Role	Source

Method: 64 deduplicated, publicly reported researcher moves between frontier-model labs, January 2025 – 5 September 2026 (research cutoff). Inclusion: a named technical researcher moving between organizations reported as frontier-model or foundation-model labs; executives without research roles, product/policy staff, academia and ordinary product engineering were excluded. Labels normalized: Google → Google DeepMind, Meta → Meta AI. Each row links one corroborating source; per-row source counts were collected but cut for space. Some months reflect the public report date rather than the start date.

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