OpenAI fed Meta's superintelligence push, while Thinking Machines Lab became a revolving door

Which AI researchers moved between frontier labs since 2025 — who left where, where they went, and when? This census covers 26 documented public moves between frontier-model labs from January 2025 through 29 August 2026, each dated to its public announcement or report month. It is a census of documented public moves, not a claim to know every private personnel change.

Left column: lab departed · right column: lab joined · ribbon width: researchers on that route · gold marks routes travelled by repeat movers (Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, Lilian Weng) · hover a ribbon for the names

Twelve of the 26 moves ran OpenAI → Meta AI, ten of them announced in the June–July 2025 wave when Meta unveiled its superintelligence lab — abcdstable.com

Google DeepMind lost five senior researchers in June 2026, four to Anthropic including Nobel laureate John Jumper and one, Noam Shazeer, to OpenAI — startupfortune.com

Barret Zoph and Luke Metz each moved twice inside eight months: Thinking Machines Lab to OpenAI in January 2026, then on to Google DeepMind and Meta AI respectively in August 2026 — newslocker.com

Thinking Machines Lab sat on both sides of the churn: it recruited John Schulman from Anthropic in February 2025, then lost four co-founders and leaders to OpenAI, Meta AI and Google DeepMind by August 2026 — fortune.com

All 26 moves, in order

Month	Researcher	Lab left	Lab joined	Source

Documented public-move census, January 2025 – 29 August 2026. 26 curated moves distilled from 46 candidate rows across 8 broad and focused search passes; month is the public announcement or report month where an exact start month was unavailable. Meta, Meta AI and Meta Superintelligence Labs are normalized to Meta AI; Google to Google DeepMind where the source concerns its frontier lab. Duplicate June–July 2025 reports were merged to the earliest clear announcement month; rows with wrong dates or stale origins (Mira Murati 2024 departure, misdated Jumper and Shazeer rows, Karpathy, Zoph/Metz stale Thinking Machines origins) were excluded. Only direct employment moves between frontier-model labs are kept.

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