A census of 41 publicly reported direct moves between frontier AI labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines Lab — from January 2025 through 28 August 2026: 27 moves in 2025, 14 in 2026. Meta was the destination for 24 of the 41, most of them in a single June–July 2025 burst; in 2026 the current turned toward OpenAI and Anthropic. Each move is one row, one ribbon share, one drifting particle.
| Month | Researcher | Left | Joined | Source |
|---|
Method: best-effort census of publicly reported direct lab-to-lab moves, not private personnel data, scanned through 2026-08-28. 41 moves retained from roughly 150 press rows across five research passes; duplicated coverage reconciled on researcher + origin + destination + month, and announcement month used where no separate start month was stated. Google, DeepMind and Google Research are shown as Google DeepMind; Meta AI, FAIR and Meta Superintelligence Labs as Meta. Excluded: moves touching non-frontier employers (Scale AI, Microsoft, VC firms), rows dated only to a bare year, company-founding events, one clearly erroneous row, and two mid-2025 Meta hires reported without any month. Researchers who moved twice are counted once per move.