96 researcher moves between frontier AI labs since 2025 — Meta's mid-2025 wave pulled in 37 of them
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 public-record scan of press reporting found 96 distinct researcher lab-to-lab moves announced or reported from January 2025 through November 2026, drawn from Reuters, Wired, TechCrunch, The Verge and others. This is a documented census of reported moves, not a complete employment registry — quiet moves may be missing. Months marked “announced” use the public-announcement month; others use the reported or actual joining month.
Flow of researchers from the lab they left (left side) to the lab they joined (right side). Ribbon width = number of moves. Flows of one move outside the top pairs fold into “Other pairs”. Hover a ribbon for the researchers behind it; hover a lab for its ins and outs.
OpenAI is the biggest source of talent in the record: 38 of the 96 moves left OpenAI, including 15 departures to Thinking Machines Lab alone — reuters.com
Meta's mid-2025 recruiting wave accounts for 37 moves into Meta Platforms or Meta Superintelligence Labs during 2025, peaking at 23 moves recorded in July alone — reuters.com
Thinking Machines Lab appears on both sides of the ledger: 15 arrivals since its February 2025 launch, then 5 departures, including two co-founders returning to OpenAI in January 2026 — techcrunch.com
23 researchers show more than one recorded move or reported destination — among them Barrett Zoph, John Schulman, Yann LeCun and Noam Shazeer — a sign of rapid sequential moves and conflicting attributions in the reporting — wired.com
Every recorded move, chronologically
Month
Researcher
Left
Joined
Role
Basis
Source
Method: 96 deduplicated researcher moves between frontier AI labs (one row per researcher + origin + destination), compiled from 432 source-level press records across Reuters, Wired, TechCrunch, The Verge, FT, Anthropic and others, covering January 2025 – November 2026 as scanned on November 7, 2026. “Basis” states whether the month is the public-announcement month, the reported move month, or the actual joining month. Each table row links one representative source; additional duplicate URL variants were cut for space. Public-record census only — unreported moves are absent.