Three waves moved 34 researchers between frontier labs: Meta’s 2025 raid, the January 2026 Thinking Machines exodus, and DeepMind’s June 2026 losses

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-web scan collected on October 14, 2026 surfaced 39 candidate moves; after removing five false or duplicate candidates, 34 defensible researcher and technical-leader moves remain, spanning January 2025 through October 2026 across ten frontier labs. This is a census of publicly reported moves, not a complete HR roster, so the true total is larger. Five researchers moved more than once.

Each arc is one move, left lab to joined lab, placed at its move month (start month when stated, otherwise announcement or report month). Hover a dot or arc for the researcher and sources; hover a lab name to isolate its moves.

Meta Superintelligence Labs took in 7 researchers during 2025–26 — from OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Thinking Machines — including Shengjia Zhao as chief scientist (ft.com).

In January 2026 four researchers — Barrett Zoph, Luke Metz, Sam Schoenholz and Lia Guy — left Thinking Machines Lab for OpenAI in a single defection wave (fortune.com).

June 2026 was Google DeepMind’s worst month: Nobel laureate John Jumper, Alexander Pritzel, Jonas Adler and Arthur Conmy went to Anthropic, and Noam Shazeer to OpenAI (hindustantimes.com).

Andrew Tulloch, Barrett Zoph and Luke Metz each moved three times in 21 months; Tulloch’s OpenAI → Thinking Machines → Meta → Anthropic path is the longest (htx.com).

All 34 retained moves

Researcher	Left	Joined	Month	Date basis	Research area	Sources

Method: public-report census of researcher and technical-research-leader moves between frontier general-purpose model labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta’s frontier-research groups, xAI, Microsoft AI, Cohere, Thinking Machines Lab, AMI Labs, Ineffable Intelligence), January 2025 – October 14, 2026. Web scan returned 39 candidate rows; 5 false or duplicate candidates were removed (predated 2025, wrong immediate origin, founder-executive rather than researcher, or duplicate origin), leaving the 34 shown. Month is the stated start month where available, otherwise the announcement or report month, as labelled. “Sources” counts corroborating pages located for the move; one URL is linked per row and no single URL backs more than 4 rows. Not a complete HR roster; moves never publicly reported are absent.

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