85 frontier-lab researcher moves since 2025: Meta swallowed the field, then 2026 flowed back to OpenAI and Anthropic

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.”

85 publicly reported moves of researchers, research engineers, model-infrastructure and safety staff, founders and hands-on research leaders between 13 frontier labs, February 2025 through September 2026 — a best-effort census of what the press reported, not a private employment registry. 58 moves landed in 2025, 27 in 2026; each month is a stated start month or, failing that, the announcement month.

Where researchers went, lab to lab

Ribbon colour: into Meta into OpenAI or Anthropic everything else — hover a ribbon for the names behind it
The single biggest corridor is OpenAI → Meta: 17 moves between June 2025 and August 2026, at the height of Meta’s superintelligence hiring push. reuters.com
Meta took in 29 of the 58 moves of 2025 — half the year’s traffic — but only 5 of 27 in 2026, while losing 20 people of its own in 2026. wired.com
Thinking Machines Lab both gains and bleeds: 7 hires from OpenAI in 2025, then 5 people back to OpenAI in 2026, including two co-founders. techcrunch.com
Anthropic’s 2026 intake includes Nobel-cited talent: John Jumper is among 4 moves from Google DeepMind between June and August 2026. reuters.com

Every reported move, in order

MonthResearcherLeftJoinedBasisContextCorroborationSource

Move-level data: 85 deduplicated researcher moves between frontier labs, Feb 2025 – Sep 2026, compiled from 2,035 unique live-web search results across 12 query families with semantic extraction on 2,000, then normalized and deduplicated by person and route. “Frontier lab” is used broadly and includes new ventures (Thinking Machines Lab, Safe Superintelligence, AMI Labs, Ineffable Intelligence); subdivisions are rolled into parents (Meta superintelligence org → Meta, Microsoft AI → Microsoft, Gemini/DeepMind → Google DeepMind). Each month is a stated start month or, when unavailable, the announcement month. Rows shaded amber rest on a single reporting host; no single URL supports more than 4 of the 85 rows. Corridor totals come from a separate precomputed aggregate. Public reporting only — unreported moves are absent.

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