Meta hired 26 of the 40 frontier-lab researchers who switched labs 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.”

A web review found and corroborated 40 distinct researcher moves between frontier AI labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Thinking Machines Lab, Safe Superintelligence and peers — from January 2025 through September 17, 2026. There is no authoritative registry: these are all the moves found and corroborated in the search, not a guaranteed exhaustive census. Month is the stated move month, or the month it was first publicly reported.

Where researchers went, lab to lab

Ribbon width = number of moves. Hover a ribbon for the researchers behind it; hover a lab for its ins and outs. Filter by period.

Moves by month

Colour marks the destination: dark = joined Meta, grey = joined any other lab. The June–July 2025 spike is Meta’s hiring wave.

Meta’s June–July 2025 wave alone accounts for 20 of the 40 moves, most from OpenAI. bitgetapp.com

OpenAI is the biggest source of departures: 18 of 40 moves left OpenAI, 15 of them for Meta. indianexpress.com

In June 2026, four Google DeepMind researchers — including AlphaFold’s John M. Jumper — moved to Anthropic, and Noam Shazeer moved to OpenAI. edgen.beta.edgen.tech

Thinking Machines Lab, a 2025 destination, became a 2026 source: five researchers left it for OpenAI or Meta between January and April 2026. cryptopolitan.com

All 40 moves

Researcher	Lab left	Lab joined	Month	Details

Method: consolidated web review of reported researcher moves between frontier-scale foundation-model labs, January 2025 – September 17, 2026; 40 moves after merging duplicates and resolving conflicts (one alias merged, one conflicting origin dropped, one origin corrected against the 104-row candidate set, one founder/executive excluded as a non-researcher). Each row counts one person moving directly between labs; sources span 28 hosts, no single URL supporting more than 4 rows. Google/Google Research shown as Google DeepMind; Meta AI/Meta Superintelligence Labs shown as Meta. Research context and source shown as expandable details for space.

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