Meta's mid-2025 raid and DeepMind's 2026 exodus dominate 38 frontier-lab moves
Which AI researchers moved between frontier labs since 2025 — who left where, went where, and when? The evidence covers 38 documented moves across 8 labs from January 2025 through August 2026, assembled from public reporting as of 29 August 2026. Rows count moves, not people: Barret Zoph and Luke Metz each moved twice.
38documented moves
19joined Meta Superintelligence Labs
10moves in June 2025, the peak month
14departures from Google DeepMind
Ribbon colour follows the lab researchers left · left column: lab left · right column: lab joined · ribbon width = number of moves · drifting dots: one per researcher · monthly strip below shows when moves happened
Meta Superintelligence Labs took 19 of the 38 moves, 12 of them straight from OpenAI in June–July 2025 —
semasocial.comJune 2026 saw 4 senior exits from Google DeepMind, including AlphaFold's John Jumper to Anthropic and Noam Shazeer to OpenAI —
businessinsider.comThinking Machines Lab both gained and lost: it hired John Schulman from Anthropic in February 2025, then lost 4 researchers back to OpenAI later in the window —
fortune.comNicholas Carlini's move from Google DeepMind to Anthropic is dated only as "this spring" by its source, so its month is shown as unresolved —
businessinsider.com
All 38 moves
| Researcher | Left | Joined | Month | Source |
Documented, best-effort list of frontier-lab researcher moves from public web reporting, January 2025 – August 2026, assembled 2026-08-29. 38 rows; each row is one move (a researcher may appear twice), retained only when a named researcher had a reported origin and destination lab. One move's month is unresolved ("this spring"). Not a census: unreported moves and incomplete recent months are missing. Click a table header to sort.