13 researchers, 15 moves: Anthropic and OpenAI drained Google DeepMind and Thinking Machines in 2026

Asked:

Who moved between ai-labs in 2026

A working census of publicly reported direct personnel moves between frontier AI/model-building labs, 1 January – 31 August 2026: 15 moves by 13 unique people across 9 organizations. OpenAI received 6 moves, Anthropic 5, Meta Superintelligence Labs 3, Google DeepMind 1; the single largest route was Google DeepMind → Anthropic (4 people), and June was the peak month with 6 moves.

Where people went

Ribbon color follows the destination lab. Hover a ribbon or lab to see the people behind it. Drifting dots: one per person, following their move.

Month by month

Findings

Four Google DeepMind researchers — John Jumper, Alexander Pritzel, Arthur Conmy and Jonas Adler — joined Anthropic within a single June week, the largest cluster of the year. thedeveloperstory.com

Barret Zoph moved twice: back to OpenAI from Thinking Machines Lab in January, then to Google DeepMind as vice president of research in August. currently.att.yahoo.com

Luke Metz also moved twice — Thinking Machines Lab → OpenAI in January, then to Meta Superintelligence Labs seven months later, in August. thenextweb.com

Google DeepMind lost 6 people but hired 1 back; Thinking Machines Lab and Meta AI lost 3 and 2 with no reported inbound moves in the period. techtimes.com

Roster

Month	Person	From	To	Role	Source

Working census of publicly reported direct moves between frontier AI/model-building organizations (including company research groups and Virtue AI), 2026-01-01 through 2026-08-31; 15 rows, 13 unique people. Dates are shown by month because several reports gave only a month or approximate timing; exact-looking dates in sources served only as ordering aids. Excludes old moves merely mentioned in 2026, ordinary tech-company transfers without a clear AI-lab endpoint, and unconfirmed offers. Source quality is mixed; lower-confidence entries are as reported. Search cut-off 2026-08-31.

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