OpenAI to Meta accounts for 10 of 17 frontier-lab researcher moves since 2025
17 sourced researcher transitions between frontier AI labs, May 2025 through June 2026 — origin, destination, and approximate announcement date, each with a public source.
Meta pulled 10 researchers out of OpenAI in four months. All 10 OpenAI departures in this set went to Meta between June and September 2025, including Shengjia Zhao, named chief scientist of the Superintelligence Lab.
reuters.com
June 2026 saw a second wave — this time out of Google DeepMind. Five DeepMind researchers left in that month alone: four to Anthropic, one to OpenAI, one to Meta.
shaam.blog
Anthropic's four hires include a Nobel laureate. John Jumper, AlphaFold's lead scientist, left DeepMind for Anthropic on 19 June 2026, followed within a week by three Gemini contributors.
reuters.com
Every move in the set left OpenAI or Google DeepMind. The two origin labs split 10 and 7; Meta received 11 of the 17 arrivals, more than all other destinations combined.
techcrunch.com
All 17 moves, chronological
| Researcher | Date | From | To | Context | Source |
|---|
Keenable
Data: 17 researcher moves between frontier AI labs, one row per researcher/lab transition, May 2025 – June 2026. Dates are approximate announcement or reporting dates where exact start dates were unavailable. Web scan performed 2026-08-26 across news and trade coverage; this is a sourced open-web list, not an exhaustive census. "Frontier labs" includes major industrial AI-model research organizations, including Microsoft, where one Google DeepMind researcher joined its AI research operation. The brief described three DeepMind-to-Anthropic moves; the rows support four, shown here. Research context is missing for 6 rows and shown as a dash.