Meta raided OpenAI in mid-2025; a year later Google DeepMind bled to Anthropic and OpenAI
Question asked: which AI researchers moved between frontier labs since 2025 — who left which lab, where did they go, and in which month? This scan covers 18 publicly reported, named moves among frontier-scale AI labs from January 2025 through August 2026; month is when the move became public.
Nine of Meta's ten wave hires were reported in a single month, July 2025 — seven from OpenAI and two from Google DeepMind, with Shengjia Zhao named chief scientist. iq.wiki
In June 2026, four senior researchers — including Nobel laureate John Jumper — left Google DeepMind for Anthropic within roughly one week. featureddaily.com
Transformer co-author Noam Shazeer left Google DeepMind for OpenAI in the same June 2026 cluster. ciol.com
Google DeepMind also lost two researchers to Microsoft AI in mid-2025, and gained only one inbound move in this scan — Ran Xin from ByteDance Seed in March 2026. coinlive.com
All 18 moves
Researcher
Left
Joined
Month
Role / note
Source
Methodology and caveats
Public reports can lag actual start dates, so the month shown is when the move was reported, not necessarily the first day of work. Group brand names are normalized: Meta and Meta Superintelligence Labs count as one destination, Google and Google DeepMind as one lab. Only named researchers with both an origin and a destination lab were retained. Apple-origin hires and non-research executives were excluded as outside this report's frontier-lab scope. This is a sourced scan of public reporting, not an exhaustive employment registry.
Data: 18 unique researcher moves compiled from public reporting across three extraction passes, deduplicated by researcher, route and month; scope 2025-01 to 2026-08 among frontier-scale AI labs; each row links its source article. Duplicate and out-of-scope rows were removed before counting.