The frontier talent carousel: 21 moves, 19 researchers, and OpenAI→Meta as the busiest corridor

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

Publicly reported and vetted direct lab-to-lab moves, January 2025 through August 2026, across six frontier labs; each strand below is one researcher's move in its reported month.

Each strand runs from the lab a researcher left to the lab they joined, placed at the reported month. Strand colour marks the destination lab. Hover a strand or a lab lane to focus it.

OpenAI→Meta is the widest corridor with 5 moves, four of them into Meta's superintelligence effort in mid-2025 — see fortune.com
Thinking Machines Lab lost three co-founders to OpenAI in a single month, January 2026 — news9live.com
Barret Zoph and Luke Metz each moved twice: Thinking Machines Lab→OpenAI in January 2026, then onward to Google DeepMind and Meta in August 2026 — thenextweb.com
Google DeepMind lost Nobel laureate John Jumper and Jonas Adler to Anthropic and transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer to OpenAI in June 2026 — fortune.com

Every vetted move

MonthResearcherLeftJoinedRole or focusSource

Publicly reported moves found and vetted, not an exhaustive employment census: 21 direct lab-to-lab moves by 19 researchers, January 2025–August 2026. "Frontier lab" means an organization building state-of-the-art general-purpose foundation models, including Thinking Machines Lab. Month is the reported joining month where available, otherwise the announcement month. Meta Platforms, Meta AI and Meta Superintelligence Labs are shown as Meta; Google and Google DeepMind as Google DeepMind. Duplicate and conflicting press reports were reconciled to one row per move; unvetted candidate rows were cut.

This report was generated automatically by Keenable SELECT at a user's request, from publicly available web sources linked herein. Keenable does not review, verify, or endorse its contents and makes no representation as to accuracy, completeness, or timeliness; AI-based extraction may contain errors. Nothing in this report is investment, legal, financial, or other professional advice. All trademarks and referenced content remain the property of their respective owners; no affiliation or endorsement is implied. To report an error, rights concern, or request removal: legal@keenable.ai.

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