A public-reporting census of 37 dated moves by 35 named technical researchers between frontier AI labs, January 2025 through August 2026. The loudest corridor was OpenAI → Meta during Meta's 2025 superintelligence hiring drive; in early 2026 OpenAI → Anthropic and Thinking Machines → OpenAI took over, and June 2026 brought a wave of Google DeepMind departures.
Each curve is one researcher's move, placed at its announcement month · colour is the lab they joined · a double ring and bold name mark a repeat mover · hover any move or lab name for detail
| Researcher | Left | Joined | Month | Role / research | Source |
|---|
Apple appears once as a broader-scope frontier organization (Apple Foundation Models) to carry Ruoming Pang's first leg. Two further Google DeepMind departures were reported without a resolvable month and are left off the timeline: Hao Zhou to Alibaba's Qwen team and Yan Wu to ByteDance Seed — coinlive.com.
Method: public-reporting census of named technical researchers whose origin lab, destination lab and move month were publicly reported; it is not an HR-complete roster and claims nothing about unannounced moves. Built from a 43-row candidate table plus three targeted corroboration sets, deduplicated to 37 dated moves; primary or self-published sources preferred where they conflict with aggregators. The month is the announcement or effective month, never a retrospective article's publication month; three misdated returns were corrected to August 2025, John Jumper and Noam Shazeer were fixed to June 2026, one erroneous Karpathy row was excluded, and moves to non-lab destinations (an enterprise startup, a public supercomputing center) were cut. Google/Google DeepMind is normalized to Google DeepMind, Meta/MSL to Meta, Thinking Machine(s) Lab to Thinking Machines Lab. Repeat movers are counted once per move. Compiled August 2026.