OpenAI to Meta is the busiest corridor: 15 of 64 frontier-lab moves, most 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”
64 publicly reported researcher moves between 15 frontier AI labs, January 2025 through 20 September 2026, each corroborated on at least two independent web hosts. The month is the joining or announcement month found in reporting; lab aliases are normalized (Meta Superintelligence Labs → Meta, Google DeepMind absorbs Google).
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Click a ribbon to see who moved on that route.
June–July 2025 alone holds 25 of the 64 moves, driven by Meta's hiring wave from OpenAI and Google DeepMind — reuters.com
Thinking Machines Lab flips role: a destination for OpenAI leavers in early 2025, then a source of 8 outbound moves — 4 of them back to OpenAI — in 2026 — techcrunch.com
Five researchers moved twice in the period: Barrett Zoph, Luke Metz, Ruoming Pang, Andrew Tulloch and Huiwen Chang — aira.solutions
Google DeepMind lost 16 researchers in the period and its biggest single outflow, 7 moves, went to Meta — techcrunch.com
Moves per month
Every corroborated move
Month
Researcher
Left
Joined
Source
Data: 64 researcher moves between frontier AI labs, January 2025 – 20 September 2026, gathered from open-web reporting current through 2026-09-20; each row is corroborated by at least two independent hosts, with one representative source linked. A move counts a technical researcher or research leader joining another organization operating or building frontier-scale foundation models; advisers, university moves and business executives are excluded. Month is the joining or announcement month. Lab aliases were normalized. Undisclosed or unindexed moves may be missing.