Meta absorbed 35 of 110 frontier-lab researcher moves since 2025, while Google DeepMind and OpenAI lost the most
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 multi-source public-web ledger of 110 reported lab-to-lab moves from January 2025 through September 19, 2026, each corroborated across at least two independent web hosts. Because private employment changes are not comprehensively disclosed, this is a corroborated ledger, not a provably exhaustive census; each row is one move, and 13 researchers appear more than once.
Flow of researchers from the lab they left (columns on the left) to the lab they joined (right). Ribbon width = number of moves; hover a ribbon or lab for the names behind it. Destinations with a single move are grouped as “other new labs”.
Meta’s mid-2025 recruiting wave pulled entire founding teams, including all three founders of OpenAI’s Zürich office in June 2025 — zuerich.ai
Thinking Machines Lab launched in February 2025 with a founding cohort drawn largely from OpenAI, led by former CTO Mira Murati — en.wikipedia.org
By 2026, Thinking Machines Lab itself became a source: 12 moves in the ledger leave it for Anthropic, OpenAI and new labs — techcrunch.com
The single best-corroborated move is Yonghui Wu leaving Google DeepMind to head ByteDance’s Seed team, matched across 22 independent hosts — finance.biggo.com
John Schulman appears twice for February 2025 — reported as leaving both OpenAI and Anthropic for Thinking Machines Lab; both reported affiliations are kept visible in the table rather than merged — techcrunch.com
Every move, chronologically
Month
Researcher
Left
Joined
Role / context
Hosts
Source
Method: multi-source public-web ledger of 110 reported researcher moves between frontier AI labs, January 2025 – September 19, 2026, ordered chronologically. Each row is one reported move corroborated on at least two independent web hosts; “hosts” counts those hosts. Months are the reported move or announcement month. Advisory-only roles, board seats, investors and non-frontier organizations were excluded. In the flow diagram, destinations receiving a single move are grouped as “other new labs”; the table shows every row.