Meta drained OpenAI in 2025 — then Google DeepMind bled to Anthropic and OpenAI in 2026

27 publicly reported researcher moves between six frontier labs, January 2025 through 28 August 2026, one person per flow unit. Month means the month the move was publicly reported or announced when an exact start month was unavailable. Best-effort public-record census, not an official employee ledger.

moves in 2025 moves in 2026 · each drifting dot is one researcher · hover a ribbon for names, a lab for its balance

Twelve of the researchers listed here left OpenAI for Meta during 2025 — including Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, hired together out of OpenAI's Zurich office in June — reuters.com

June 2026 brought a cluster out of Google DeepMind within days: Noam Shazeer to OpenAI, then John Jumper, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel all to Anthropic — techcrunch.com

Shengjia Zhao joined Meta from OpenAI in June 2025 and was named chief scientist of the superintelligence group the following month — bloomberg.com

Traffic ran both ways: Angela Fan left Meta for OpenAI in July 2025, part of a hiring round that also pulled infrastructure leads from xAI — wired.com

Every move, one row each

Researcher	Left	Joined	Month	Role	Source

Best-effort public-record census of researcher moves between frontier labs (organizations building frontier general-purpose foundation models: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, Cohere, Thinking Machines Lab, Mistral AI, Safe Superintelligence), January 2025 through 28 August 2026. 27 moves reconciled from three result sets of roughly 82 source rows: Google and Google DeepMind were merged as Google DeepMind, Meta Superintelligence Labs merged into Meta, duplicate rows collapsed, and one 2024 move, two unverifiable entries and non-research product executives were cut. Month is the month the move was publicly reported or announced when an exact start month was unavailable; one row keeps a blank month. This is not an exhaustive employee ledger.