Meta's superintelligence push pulled 35 researchers from rival labs, and the churn kept going

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.”

An open-web census of 85 reported researcher moves between frontier AI labs from January 2025 through September 2026, drawn from Reuters, Wired, TechCrunch, CNBC, Bloomberg, The New York Times and other outlets. It covers all reported moves the research surfaced — not necessarily every unpublicized change — and a researcher appears more than once when each row is a distinct sequential move; 24 of the 85 moves rest on a single supporting article and are flagged as such.

Every move, month by month

Each dot is one reported move, placed in the month it was reported and the lane of the lab joined; colour is the lab left. A ringed dot is a researcher with more than one move. Hover or tap a dot for who moved and the source; click a legend swatch to focus one origin lab.

Meta Superintelligence Labs took in 35 of the 85 moves, 26 of them in the June–August 2025 wave — 13 from OpenAI and 9 from Google DeepMind in that window alone. cnbc.com

OpenAI lost the most people (29 departures) yet also re-hired 15 — the counter-flow includes returns from Meta and Thinking Machines within months of leaving. wired.com

Thinking Machines Lab launched in February 2025 with a bloc of OpenAI departures including Mira Murati, John Schulman and Barrett Zoph — then itself lost 9 researchers in later months. reuters.com

Eight researchers appear in more than one row — serial movers such as Andrew Tulloch, Lilian Weng and Yann LeCun made successive jumps within the 21-month window. businessinsider.com

All 85 moves

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Support	Source

Method: open-web census of reported moves between frontier AI labs, 85 rows, January 2025 – September 2026, compiled from news coverage across many independent hosts. Month is when the move was announced or reported, which can lag the actual start date. Support counts articles found backing the move; rows with one article are marked single-sourced. Source descriptions were shortened for space; each row links its source.

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