Frontier AI researcher moves since 2025
91 curated moves by 85 researchers between frontier model-building AI labs, January 2025 through August 2026, distilled from 139 source-backed reports. A move's month is its start month or its public-announcement month, whichever the sources report.
Ribbon height: one unit per researcher. “New startups” groups Periodic Labs, AMI Labs, Ricursive Intelligence, Ineffable Intelligence and Recursive Superintelligence. Hover a ribbon for the researchers behind it; hover a lab for its inflows, outflows and net. Each drifting dot is one researcher in motion.
Mid-2025 was a one-way street: 39 of the 63 curated 2025 moves ended at Meta’s superintelligence group, 13 of them from OpenAI alone in the June–August push. wired.com
Apple lost nine researchers in 2025 — six to Meta, including foundation-models chief Ruoming Pang, who moved on again to OpenAI in February 2026 — and three more in 2026, split between OpenAI and Anthropic. macrumors.com
Google DeepMind gave up eight researchers in 2026 — four to Anthropic, among them Nobel laureate John Jumper, plus Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and three startup founders — after losing nine to Meta and five to Microsoft AI the year before. techcrunch.com
Thinking Machines Lab churned hardest: six senior arrivals in 2025, then seven departures, four of them back to OpenAI — including CTO Barret Zoph and Lilian Weng, who both round-tripped. en.wikipedia.org
| Researcher | Left | Joined | Month | Specialty | Flag | Source |
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Data: 139 source-backed candidate rows on researcher moves between frontier model-building AI labs, extracted through 2026-08-26. Identical researcher–origin–destination reports were merged (44 rows) and Google/DeepMind and Meta/Superintelligence-Labs labels normalized, leaving 91 curated moves by 85 researchers. A move’s month is its start or public-announcement month; where reports disagree, the better-sourced month or origin is kept and the conflict flagged in the table. Four widely known pre-2025 moves reported as new — Sutskever to SSI, Babuschkin to xAI, Lample to Mistral, Schulman to Anthropic — were excluded as historical false positives. Aggregator and redirect URLs appear as published.