Keenable SELECT · Frontier AI researcher moves since 2025

OpenAI supplied over half of every lab-to-lab researcher move — and Meta caught most of them

31 publicly reported direct moves by named technical researchers between frontier-model labs, January 2025 through 28 August 2026 — 16 in 2025, 15 in 2026. Each ribbon is a corridor between labs; each drifting dot is one researcher.

Ribbon colour marks the lab a researcher left. Hover a ribbon for the names and months behind it; hover a lab for its arrivals, departures and net. Dots drift once per researcher along their corridor.

Every move, month by month

Month ↕	Researcher ↕	Left ↕	Joined ↕	Role / context ↕	Source ↕

Method: sourced public-record inventory of direct moves between frontier-model labs by named technical researchers, research scientists and engineers, technical research leaders, and technical lab founders — 31 rows, January 2025 to 28 August 2026, compiled 2026. Months are the announced or reported effective month where exact start dates were unavailable; this is not a claim to capture private or unannounced personnel changes. Lab names are normalized (Meta AI / FAIR / Meta Superintelligence Labs → Meta; Google / Google DeepMind → Google DeepMind; ByteDance → ByteDance Seed where the source says Seed; Tencent → Tencent Hunyuan). One uncorroborated row and duplicate reports across sources were excluded; conflicting dates were resolved to the corrected records.