Twenty-two researcher moves reshaped the frontier labs: Meta raided OpenAI in 2025, then OpenAI and Anthropic hit back in 2026

Which AI researchers moved between frontier labs since 2025 — who left where, where they went, and in which month? This scan of public reporting covers January 2025 through August 2026 (scan date 30 Aug 2026): 22 validated moves by 21 researchers across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Thinking Machines Lab and Periodic Labs.

Each arrow is one researcher's move, placed at its reported month, from the lab left (dot) to the lab joined (arrowhead). Colour marks the destination lab. Hover an arrow for details.

Meta took 11 of the 12 moves reported in 2025, seven of them directly from OpenAI in June–July alone — cybernews.com

In January 2026 OpenAI hired three Thinking Machines Lab researchers at once — Barret Zoph, Luke Metz and Samuel Schoenholz — wired.com

Google DeepMind lost four senior researchers in June 2026, including Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic and Noam Shazeer to OpenAI — pondero.ai

Barret Zoph moved twice in the window: Thinking Machines Lab → OpenAI in January 2026, then OpenAI → Google DeepMind in August 2026 — finance.yahoo.com

Researcher	Left	Joined	Month	Source

Public-reporting-based scan of researcher moves between frontier foundation-model labs, 2025-01 to 2026-08 (scan date 2026-08-30). 22 validated moves by 21 researchers drawn from 87 candidate rows; duplicates merged, extraction errors (mis-dated or unsourced rows) excluded. Month is the reported joining or announcement month where no exact start date was available. This is not a complete employment registry: quiet or undisclosed moves may be absent. Two moves (Trapit Bansal, Hyung Won Chung) carried no usable source link in the rows.

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