The talent war ran through Meta: 12 of 41 frontier-lab moves went OpenAI → Meta

Which AI researchers moved between frontier labs since 2025 — who left which lab, where they went, and when?

41 publicly reported direct lab-to-lab moves by 37 researchers across 8 frontier labs, January 2025 – August 2026. Ribbon colour marks the year of the move.

The OpenAI → Meta wave was concentrated in June–July 2025, when Meta stood up its Superintelligence team with hires such as Trapit Bansal and Jason Wei. techcrunch.com

A second wave ran Google DeepMind → Anthropic: five researchers in June 2026 alone. explainx.ai

Thinking Machines Lab flipped from recruiter to source: it hired stars like John Schulman at launch in 2025, then lost people to OpenAI, Meta, xAI and Google DeepMind in 2026. futuresearch.ai

Three people moved twice in the period — Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng and Luke Metz — each passing through Thinking Machines Lab. edgen.tech

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Role / context	Source

Best-effort public-web census of directly reported lab-to-lab moves: 41 move rows, 37 distinct researchers, Jan 2025 – Aug 2026. Month is when the move was publicly reported, not necessarily the first working month; only direct moves counted, intervening employers excluded. Meta and Meta Superintelligence Labs are grouped as Meta in the diagram but kept as sourced in the table. Built from ~5,900 deduplicated pages across three search batches; some 2026 moves rest on specialist or secondary reporting.

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