52 frontier-lab moves since 2025: Meta's mid-2025 raid pulled 20 researchers, then the talent started flowing back out

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.”

The rows cover 52 publicly reported researcher moves between frontier AI labs from February 2025 through September 2026, each corroborated by at least two independent web hosts — a best-effort census of public reports, not of private personnel changes. Three researchers appear twice because they moved sequentially.

Meta Superintelligence Labs took 21 of the 52 moves — 20 of them in 2025, including 9 from OpenAI in June–July alone. reuters.com

Barrett Zoph, Ruoming Pang and Andrew Tulloch each moved twice — Zoph went OpenAI → Thinking Machines Lab and back to OpenAI within a year. techcrunch.com

Thinking Machines Lab hired 6 ex-OpenAI people in early 2025, then lost 6 people itself — 4 of them back to OpenAI, including Barrett Zoph, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz in January 2026. techcrunch.com

In June 2026 a group left Google DeepMind at once: John M. Jumper, Alexander Pritzel and Jonas Adler to Anthropic, Noam Shazeer to OpenAI. businessinsider.com

All 52 moves

Click a column header to sort. Hosts = independent web hosts corroborating the move.

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Hosts	Source

Method: 52 publicly reported researcher moves between frontier AI labs, Feb 2025 – Sep 2026, research current through 2026-10-24. One row per distinct researcher/origin/destination move; month is the reported joining month or, where only an announcement was public, the announcement month. “Frontier lab” is used broadly, including corporate foundation-model groups (Apple, Microsoft AI, Cohere, Tencent) and new frontier startups. Every row is supported by at least two independent hosts; one representative source is linked per row. Names and lab brands are normalized. Private or undisclosed moves are out of scope.

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