Two waves defined the frontier talent war: OpenAI to Meta in mid-2025, then DeepMind to Anthropic in June 2026

Question asked: which AI researchers moved between frontier labs since 2025 — for each move, the researcher, the lab they left, where they went, and the month.

Publicly reported direct moves, 14 researchers across 4 frontier labs, January 2025 through August 29, 2026; 9 moves have a reported month, 5 do not.

Meta's Superintelligence Labs push pulled at least 4 dated recruits straight from OpenAI in June–July 2025, plus 5 more OpenAI-to-Meta moves whose month was never publicly pinned down — theoutpost.ai

Four Google DeepMind researchers left within six days in June 2026, three of them to Anthropic — including Nobel laureate John Jumper — sdd.sh

Noam Shazeer, co-lead of Google's Gemini models, broke the Anthropic pattern by joining OpenAI in June 2026 — qz.com

The DeepMind exits were costly beyond talent: the brain drain was tied to a reported $270B drop in Alphabet's value — byteiota.com

Every documented move

Researcher	Left	Joined	Month	Role / note	Source

Method: deduplicated list of publicly reported direct researcher moves between frontier labs — organizations developing frontier general-purpose models (OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, Anthropic) — January 2025 to August 29, 2026. 14 rows shown, one per researcher/origin/destination. The month is the public announcement or reporting month when an exact start month was unavailable; moves with no reported month sit in the "month unresolved" band and table section. Rows with ambiguous employer sequence or unclear direct-move status were cut. This is a documented, non-exhaustive public-source list, not a census.

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