Meta pulled 18 of 2025's 32 named frontier-lab movers — 13 from OpenAI alone
Asked:
“Who moved between frontier LLM last year”
The roster below covers 32 named person-moves across 11 directional routes between frontier-model labs reported in calendar 2025, each backed by at least two supporting pages across 8 source hosts. Thinking Machines Lab and Adaption Labs are newly founded frontier-model ventures included in scope. It is the full vetted set recovered, not a guaranteed census: many 2025 hires were reported anonymously or only once.
Where the talent flowed
Ribbon width = named movers on that route; blue ribbons flow into Meta, grey are all other routes. Hover a ribbon for the people behind it. John Schulman appears on two consecutive routes (OpenAI → Thinking Machines via Anthropic), so routes sum to 33 person-route rows for 32 people.
Meta's superintelligence push took 18 named researchers in — 13 from OpenAI, 3 from Google DeepMind, 2 from Anthropic — mostly in a June–July burst.
techcrunch.comThe year opened with Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab staffing from OpenAI — Barrett Zoph, John Schulman and Jonathan Lachman joined by mid-February.
ft.comCounterflow started late: from July, Meta lost Angela Fan, Chaya Nayak and Ethan Knight to OpenAI, plus one researcher each to Anthropic and Cohere.
wired.comOpenAI also hired for infrastructure, taking Mike Dalton and Uday Ruddarraju from xAI for its scaling team in July.
wired.com
Method: 32 named person-moves between frontier LLM labs reported in calendar 2025, vetted to a ≥2-supporting-page threshold across 8 distinct source hosts; no single URL backs more than 5 rows. Dates are first public report dates, not start dates. “Pages” counts supporting pages found per person. Anonymously or singly reported hires were cut.