64 researcher moves between frontier labs since 2025 — Meta's superintelligence push pulled half of them, then the flow turned back
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.”
64 publicly reported direct moves between frontier-model labs from January 2025 through September 20, 2026, drawn from 28 independent source hosts (no single URL supports more than 4 rows). This is the verified set found — there is no authoritative registry of lab personnel, so other unreported moves may exist. Month is the month the move was publicly announced.
Every move, month by month: each curve runs from the lab left to the lab joined
Hover or tap a curve or dot for the researcher, role and source. Colour marks the destination lab.
Meta Superintelligence Labs took 33 of the 64 moves, 16 of them from OpenAI and 13 from Google DeepMind — most in the June–August 2025 wave (
reuters.com).
July 2025 was the peak month with 15 announced moves, followed by 12 in June 2025 (
bnnbloomberg.ca).
Four researchers moved twice: Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng and Luke Metz all left Thinking Machines Lab again by mid-2026, and Andrew Tulloch went Thinking Machines → Meta → Anthropic (
themuslimpress.com).
After January 2026 the direction reversed: of 17 moves in 2026, OpenAI (7) and Anthropic (5) were the top destinations while Meta added only 3 (
brendonbeebe.substack.com).
Method: 64 publicly reported or announced direct moves between frontier AI labs, Jan 2025 – Sep 20, 2026; one row per move, repeat moves by the same person kept. Month is the public announcement month, not the private start date. Each row was corroborated on at least two distinct URLs; one representative source is linked. 28 independent hosts; no URL backs more than 4 rows. “Frontier lab” = an organization training or founded to build general-purpose frontier-scale models; policy-only roles excluded. Research current as of 2026-09-20.