Meta drained OpenAI and DeepMind in 2025; 2026 sent talent back to OpenAI and on to Anthropic

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.”

This is a census of publicly reported moves, not an exhaustive employee database: 74 distinct researcher moves between frontier and foundation-model labs, consolidated from 106 screened route-month reports across 17 independent hosts, covering January 2025 through August 2026 (research cutoff 2026-09-22). Months are the joining/effective month where reported; otherwise the announcement month, labelled "announced".

Where researchers went, lab to lab

Ribbon width = number of researchers on the route. Hover a ribbon or lab for the actual names. Routes with one move are drawn too — every screened move is shown.

Meta took in 28 of the 47 moves reported in 2025, pulling researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Apple's foundation-models team and Anthropic — including four key OpenAI model creators in one June week (wired.com).

Early 2026 reversed a 2025 flow: seven Thinking Machines Lab researchers, including cofounders Barret Zoph, Luke Metz and Lilian Weng, returned to OpenAI (techcrunch.com).

Google DeepMind lost marquee scientists in 2026: AlphaFold co-creator John Jumper to Anthropic and Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI, both announced in June (reuters.com).

Two direct routes are corrected against primary sources: Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic in May 2026 from his own Eureka Labs, not straight from OpenAI (reuters.com), and John Schulman came to Thinking Machines Lab from Anthropic, his employer at the time (siliconvalleyinvestclub.com).

Every move, in order

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Role	Source

Public-report census of researcher moves between frontier and general-purpose foundation-model labs, 2025-01 to 2026-08, screened as of 2026-09-22. 106 screened route-month records were consolidated to 74 distinct researcher moves by preferring joining/effective month over announcement month and keeping the direct prior employer; adviser-only appointments and non-research executives were cut. Sources span 17 independent hosts (Reuters, Bloomberg, FT, Wired, TechCrunch and others); each row links its own source. Apple, Ai2, Tencent and new startups appear only where the row concerns foundation-model research. Months labelled "announced" mean no effective month was public.

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