OpenAI to Meta was the widest corridor of 2025's lab talent war — then the traffic turned both ways
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.”
93 publicly reported moves by hands-on researchers and technical leaders between 12 frontier-model labs, January 2025 through October 2026, compiled from Reuters, Wired, TechCrunch, The Verge, Bloomberg, the FT and other outlets. This is the public record of announced moves, not a complete HR ledger; 20 single-source additions are flagged as uncertain.
Ribbon width = researchers moving through October of the selected month, cumulative from January 2025. Hover a ribbon for names; hover a lab for its ins and outs. Drag the slider to replay the period.
Meta's June–July 2025 superintelligence drive took 11 researchers from OpenAI in two months, including Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu and Hongyu Ren — the single widest corridor of the period.
reuters.comThe flow reversed: Avi Verma and Ethan Knight left Meta for OpenAI in August 2025, and Ruoming Pang followed in February 2026.
wired.comThinking Machines Lab unwound in 2026: Barret Zoph, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz returned to OpenAI in January, while Andrew Tulloch had already left for Meta in October 2025.
theverge.comJune 2026 brought a Google DeepMind exodus to Anthropic — John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel and Arthur Conmy — while Noam Shazeer went to OpenAI.
ft.comFive researchers moved twice or more in the window: Andrew Tulloch, Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, Lilian Weng and Ethan Knight.
aiindustrytoday.com
Method: 93 deduplicated researcher moves between frontier-model labs, 2025-01 to 2026-10, assembled from public reporting and first-party statements (76 core news-sourced records plus vetted supplemental rows); one row per actual move, Meta entities normalized to Meta AI / MSL, month is the earliest well-supported public announcement; policy-only, product-only and stale-affiliation rows excluded; rows marked "single source" rest on one host and are less certain. Undisclosed moves are absent.