The scan collected 106 reported researcher moves between frontier general-purpose AI labs from January 2025 through September 2026, each backed by its own source URL across many independent hosts. It is a broad source-backed census, not a guaranteed complete universe: 81 of the 106 moves rest on a single independent host — often the researcher's own LinkedIn profile.
Ribbon width is number of moves in the selected period. Hover a ribbon for the researchers behind it. Google and Google DeepMind, shown as reported, sit adjacent; sources use both scopes for the same parent.
Moves per month, coloured by lab left. June–July 2025 carry 30 moves (the Meta hiring wave); June 2026 carries 13, eight of them out of Google DeepMind. Click a bar to filter the flow above to that month.
| Month | Researcher | Left | Joined | Sources | Source |
|---|
Repeated names (Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Luke Metz, Xiaohua Zhai, Robin Tang) are genuinely separate sequential moves, not duplicates. Records with one independent host are badged single-source / self-reported.
Method: 106 normalized researcher–origin–destination moves between frontier general-purpose AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, Thinking Machines Lab, Safe Superintelligence, Microsoft frontier AI, Amazon AGI, Mistral, Cohere, Character AI), January 2025 – September 12, 2026. One row per move; a move month is the publicly reported month when no exact start month was available. Moves from Apple, Scale AI, universities, chip firms, VCs and non-frontier startups were excluded. 81 of 106 rows rest on one independent host, mostly LinkedIn self-reports; the Sam Schoenholz 2025-01 row is flagged as a likely month-extraction error. Frontier-lab boundaries are judgment calls and private moves may be missing.