OpenAI to Meta is the busiest corridor: 11 of 30 documented frontier-lab moves since 2025

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.”

30 cross-corroborated researcher moves between frontier AI labs, January 2025 through September 2026, each backed by at least two independent web hosts. Public reporting is not a complete employee census, so this is a documented, cross-sourced list — not literally every move; month is the reported move or announcement month. Two moves carry ambiguous immediate-employer attribution; the other 28 are the high-confidence direct set.

Where researchers went, lab to lab

Ribbon width = researchers on the route. Grey = high-confidence direct move; amber dashed edge = route attribution ambiguous (Andrej Karpathy, Luke Metz). Hover a ribbon for the names behind it.

Meta’s June–July 2025 recruiting burst accounts for 13 of the 30 moves, drawn mostly from OpenAI and Google DeepMind — including all three OpenAI Zürich founders in one month. zuerich.ai

A second cluster hit in June 2026: four Google DeepMind researchers, among them Nobel laureate John M. Jumper, joined Anthropic. techcrunch.com

In the same month Noam Shazeer left Google DeepMind for OpenAI — the only Google DeepMind → OpenAI move in the set. ai-master.dev

Flows are lopsided: OpenAI lost 15 researchers and gained 2; Meta gained 14 and lost 1 (Angela Fan, to OpenAI in July 2025). theheadandtale.com

All 30 moves, chronologically

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Role	Corroboration	Source

Documented researcher moves between frontier AI labs: 30 rows, one per move, 2025-01 through 2026-09-13, compiled from public reporting with each move corroborated by at least 2 independent web hosts (no single source URL backs more than 10% of rows). Month is the reported move or announcement month; a retrospective source may publish later. Corroboration = corroborating pages / independent hosts. Full source titles cut for space; each row links its representative source.

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