66 documented researcher moves since 2025 — and 17 of them run from OpenAI to Meta

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.”

66 publicly documented researcher-move records, January 2025 through November 4, 2026, across 22 lab-to-lab corridors. Meta's hiring wave concentrates in June–July 2025; early 2026 shows a reverse flow from Thinking Machines Lab back to OpenAI. This is a broad public-record inventory, not a complete census of private personnel changes.

Where researchers moved, lab to lab

Ribbon width = documented moves. Left column: lab left. Right column: lab joined. Hover a ribbon for the named researchers behind it; hover a lab to focus its flows. Corridors with one move are drawn thin but kept.

Moves by month: Meta's June–July 2025 spike, then a 2026 reverse flow

Each bar is one month's documented moves. Colour marks moves into Meta vs into OpenAI vs all other destinations.

Findings

OpenAI → Meta is the dominant corridor: 17 documented moves from June 2025 to August 2026, backed by 142 supporting pages — fortune.com

Google DeepMind lost researchers in two directions at once: 7 to Meta and 7 to Microsoft, nearly all in 2025 — cnbc.com

The flow reversed in 2026: 5 moves from Thinking Machines Lab back to OpenAI between January and July 2026, including two cofounders — wired.com

Five researchers appear in more than one record — John Schulman, Huiwen Chang, Shengjia Zhao, Andrew Tulloch and Luke Metz — marked “repeat mover” in the table — theverge.com

Every documented move

Researcher	Left	Joined	Month	Pages	Source

“Pages” = corroborating pages found for the move; 1 means a single supporting page, so treat with lower confidence.

Method: 66 researcher-move records, Jan 2025 – Nov 4, 2026, one row per researcher/from-lab/to-lab/month, compiled from public reporting; 2,399 unique pages were searched in a focused major-publication pass alongside a broader 1,615-page search, and final rows span many independent hosts. A number counts documented move records, not confirmed headcount; some aliases (e.g. “Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)”) retain source wording. Nothing was cut; all 66 rows and 22 corridors are shown.

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