Twenty-one researchers changed frontier labs since 2025 — Meta took nine of them, then Google DeepMind bled four in one month

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 web scan, current through 4 September 2026, surfaced 58 candidate records and kept 21 audited, source-linked moves between six frontier labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI / Meta Superintelligence Labs, Thinking Machines Lab and xAI's peer set — from June 2025 to September 2026. This is a public-reporting minimum, not a complete personnel registry: most individual moves rest on a single published source, and month means the reported joining or hiring-announcement month where an exact start month was unavailable.

Each arrow is one researcher's move, placed at its reported month; colour marks the lab joined. Hover an arrow for the source and role.
Eight OpenAI researchers went to Meta in June 2025 alone — the Reuters-reported cohort that seeded Meta Superintelligence Labs — with Jason Wei following in July. reuters.com
In June 2026 Google DeepMind lost four senior researchers in one month: John Jumper, Alexander Pritzel and Jonas Adler to Anthropic, and Noam Shazeer to OpenAI. techcrunch.com
Two moves reversed course later: Ruoming Pang left Meta back for OpenAI in February 2026, and Barret Zoph left OpenAI for Google DeepMind in August 2026. qz.com
The traffic was not one-way at Meta either: co-founder-grade talent flowed both into it (Andrew Tulloch from Thinking Machines, October 2025) and out of it (Soumith Chintala to Thinking Machines as CTO, April 2026). wired.com
ResearcherLab leftLab joinedMonthSource

Method: 21 direct lab-to-lab moves audited from a web scan of 58 candidate records (15 conservatively extracted, plus reputable-source candidates from Reuters, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, Wired, Business Insider, Quartz, Wired and Yahoo Finance), current through 2026-09-04. Month is the reported joining or announcement month where no start month was published. Duplicate person-route records were merged, Google merged into Google DeepMind and Meta into Meta AI / MSL, and rows with misdated or retrospective-only sourcing were corrected or omitted. Most rows are single-sourced; executives, investors and moves outside the frontier-lab universe were excluded.

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