OpenAI fed Meta in 2025 — then Google DeepMind became the lab everyone raided

Which AI researchers moved between frontier labs since 2025? For each move: the researcher, the lab they left, where they went, and the month it was reported.

21 publicly reported move events involving 19 researchers across 7 frontier labs, January 2025 through August 2026, by announced month.

Meta hired 7 researchers in June–July 2025, six of them straight from OpenAI, including Shengjia Zhao as chief scientist of its superintelligence group — economictimes.indiatimes.com

June 2026 flipped the map: Google DeepMind lost 5 named researchers in one month — John Jumper, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel to Anthropic, Noam Shazeer to OpenAI, Denny Zhou to Meta — techtimes.com

Thinking Machines Lab, staffed by ex-OpenAI leaders in February 2025, saw 4 departures back to OpenAI in 2026, including co-founders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz — ubos.tech

Barret Zoph moved three times: OpenAI to Thinking Machines (Feb 2025), a reported return to OpenAI (Jan 2026) that later coverage leaves ambiguous, then Google DeepMind (Aug 2026) — edgen.tech

All 21 moves

Click a column header to sort.

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Source

Best-effort census of named, publicly reported researcher moves between frontier general-purpose model labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Lab) found in web reporting through 2026-08-30 — not an HR-complete list. 21 move events, 19 researchers; month is the reported announcement month, not payroll start. Google and Google DeepMind are merged, as are Meta AI and Meta Superintelligence Labs. Moves to or from non-frontier organisations, and misdated or weakly corroborated dates, were excluded. Two of Barret Zoph's 2026 rows carry an ambiguity note rather than asserting simultaneous employers.

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