Meta pulled 28 of 43 frontier-lab researcher moves since 2025; the 2026 flow tilts to Anthropic

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.”

The scan documents 43 publicly reported, direct researcher moves between frontier labs from January 2025 through September 2026, each with a month and at least two corroborating sources. It is a documented directory, not a census: labs publish no personnel records, so unreported moves are absent.

Where the researchers went

Flow of moves between labs, ribbon width = number of researchers. Hover a ribbon for names; filter by year.

June–July 2025 alone accounts for 27 of the 43 moves, almost all into Meta’s new superintelligence organization. bitgetapp.com

OpenAI is the biggest donor lab (19 departures), including all three founders of its Zürich office, who joined Meta in June 2025. zuerich.ai

Google lost 17 researchers, 11 of them to Meta, including three gold-medal AI researchers poached in July 2025. markets.businessinsider.com

The flow reverses in 2026: of the 8 moves that year, 7 head to Anthropic or OpenAI, several leaving Meta. businessinsider.com

Every documented move, in order

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Role	Sources	Link

Method: 43 publicly reported direct moves between frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/DeepMind, Meta, xAI, Microsoft AI, Thinking Machines Lab), January 2025 – September 2026, compiled from a web research scan in which each move required a month and at least two corroborating search-source pages; “sources” counts those pages and one representative link is shown per row. Month is the publicly reported or announced month when a start date was unavailable. Nontechnical roles excluded; unreported moves are absent. No single source URL backs more than 11.6% of rows.

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