OpenAI lost the most researchers, and Meta's superintelligence push absorbed the biggest single wave in mid-2025

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.”

A broad scan of public reporting surfaced 85 publicly reported moves by 62 researchers between frontier labs, January 2025 through mid-September 2026 — each corroborated by at least three fetched pages. This is web reporting, not an employee registry: it is not guaranteed exhaustive, and rows whose route is reported under conflicting months are flagged rather than double-counted.

Every reported move, by month and destination lab

Each dot is one reported move; colour is the lab left. Hover or tap a dot for the researcher, role and source. Rows are destination labs, sorted by moves received.

Meta Superintelligence Labs took 26 reported hires in June–July 2025 alone, most poached from OpenAI — including Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu and Hongyu Ren. techcrunch.com

Thinking Machines Lab formed in February 2025 around ex-OpenAI leadership: Mira Murati as CEO, John Schulman as chief scientist, Barrett Zoph as CTO, plus Lilian Weng and others. techcrunch.com

Second-hop and return moves appear later in the window: Luke Metz left Thinking Machines for Meta Superintelligence Labs in August 2026, and Andrew Tulloch left Meta for Anthropic in September 2026. select.keenable.ai

Google DeepMind's Zurich unit lost audio and vision researchers — Marco Tagliasacchi, Zalán Borsos, Matthias Minderer — to Microsoft AI in early 2025. zuerich.ai

All 85 retained moves

Month	Researcher	Left	Joined	Role / area	Pages	Source

Method: broad web scan of public reporting on researcher moves between frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft AI, xAI, Mistral AI, Cohere, Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Lab), 2025-01 through 2026-09-16. 113 route-month records passed a minimum three-page corroboration threshold; alias rows (Google/Google DeepMind, Anthropic PBC, Meta Platforms/Meta Superintelligence Labs) were collapsed for the same person and month, leaving 85 rows. "Pages" counts corroborating fetched pages. Publication dates and retrospective articles can shift a move's reported month, so a person-route seen under two months is flagged "date conflict" rather than counted twice; rows where reporting disagrees on the origin lab are flagged "origin ambiguous". One row gives only the year 2026. Publicly reported moves found — not guaranteed exhaustive. Sources span many independent hosts; no single URL backs more than half the rows.

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