Frontier AI researcher moves since 2025 · a documented public-reporting census

Meta pulled 19 researchers in three summer months of 2025 — then 2026 sent the talent back toward OpenAI and Anthropic

34 cleaned, deduplicated moves by 33 researchers between frontier labs, documented in public reporting from January 2025 through August 2026. Each line below is one researcher changing labs in a given month; orange marks the Meta recruitment wave, blue everything else.

joined Meta — the 2025 recruitment wave every other destination — the reversal and dispersion solid — completed dashed — announced or reported, not yet confirmed complete

Between June and August 2025 Meta added 19 researchers — 16 straight from OpenAI, two from Google DeepMind and one from xAI — before co-founder Andrew Tulloch followed from Thinking Machines in October.indiatoday.in

2026 reversed the current: of 12 documented moves, Anthropic gained five (four from Google DeepMind, plus Andrej Karpathy from OpenAI) and OpenAI regained five, while Meta’s only 2026 pickup was Denny Zhou.insidersfeed.com

Thinking Machines lost five people over the window — four to OpenAI (Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, Sam Schoenholz, Lilian Weng) and co-founder Andrew Tulloch to Meta.learnaiwithkesse.wiki

Barret Zoph is the only researcher with two documented moves: Thinking Machines to OpenAI in January 2026, then OpenAI to Google in June 2026 as vice president of research.gokawiil.com

Every documented move

Researcher	Left	Joined	Month	Status	Role / note	Source

Method: a documented public-reporting census of researcher moves between frontier-scale AI labs, window 2025-01-01 to 2026-08-27. A scan produced 53 candidate rows covering 34 names before alias cleanup; after consolidating lab aliases (Meta / Meta AI / Meta Superintelligence Labs as Meta; Google / Google DeepMind as Google DeepMind; Thinking Machines / Thinking Machines Lab as Thinking Machines), deduplicating repeated reports of the same move (keeping the most-corroborated source), correcting 2026 dates misdated to 2025 (Karpathy, Jumper, Shazeer, Zoph, Adler, Pritzel), using the corroborated June 2025 routes for Avi Verma and Ethan Knight, and excluding one conflicting Andrew Tulloch row and one mis-sourced Aurko Roy row, 34 moves by 33 researchers remain — 23 completed, 11 announced or reported. A month measures when the move was publicly reported or announced. This census covers public reporting only; private or unreported moves may be missing.

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