Teams on the move
Researchers and teams moving between AI labs, and why each move matters.
- Rohit Prasad 7 October 2026
Amazon to Boston Dynamics
Former senior vice president and chief scientist for AGI at Amazon Boston Dynamics, the robotics subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Group, said it would hire Prasad as CEO. He helped build Alexa and led Amazon's AGI organization, including the… - David Robinson 2 October 2026
OpenAI to unknown
Safety Systems leader (safety transparency, system cards) Quit and published an Atlantic essay saying OpenAI's 'unimpeded optimism' as it sprints between launches fails the level of care needed; OpenAI said it pauses or holds back models… - David Robinson 2 October 2026
OpenAI to unknown
Safety leader who led the writing of OpenAI's safety reports for major launches After three and a half years, Robinson resigned and published an Atlantic essay titled 'I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken'. He says he led the… - Bo Li, Dawn Song and Sanmi Koyejo (Virtue AI co-founders) and other Virtue AI staff 2 October 2026
Meta to unknown
Co-founders of Virtue AI, an AI security startup, then members of Meta Superintelligence Labs Meta let go of the Virtue AI team it had acqui-hired into Superintelligence Labs in June 2026, about four months earlier. Spokesperson Andy… - Jay Clayton 2 October 2026
US Director of National Intelligence to White House (AI czar)
Director of National Intelligence, and former SEC chair Trump is reported to have picked Clayton as the new US AI czar. He is expected to stay Director of National Intelligence. The Indian Express headline says he was tapped, but the… - Three unnamed OpenAI safety researchers 1 October 2026
OpenAI to unknown
Researchers on OpenAI's safety team OpenAI says it parted ways with three safety researchers after an investigation found they mishandled sensitive company information outside established procedures. The Wall Street Journal reported they… - Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang 1 October 2026
OpenAI to unknown
Safety and alignment researchers OpenAI terminated three safety researchers after an internal investigation found they mishandled sensitive company information outside established procedures. The Wall Street Journal reported that the… - Fei-Fei Li 28 September 2026
World Labs to AMD
Co-founder and CEO, World Labs AMD agreed to buy World Labs in an all-stock deal valued around $8.2B; Li will become EVP and chief scientist reporting to Lisa Su while the team keeps advancing spatial-intelligence model research. - Tamay Besiroglu 11 September 2026
Mechanize to Google DeepMind
Co-founder and ex-CEO, Mechanize; Epoch AI co-founder Google completed a $1.5B+ talent deal (terms undisclosed); Besiroglu is now a DeepMind research scientist with over a dozen ex-Mechanize staff mostly on midtraining, to close Google's… - Andrew Tulloch 9 September 2026
Meta Superintelligence Labs to unknown
Researcher, Meta TBD Lab Reportedly delayed his exit until Meta launched its Muse models. His destination is unconfirmed, and reports floated Anthropic or a startup of his own. - Jacob Coxon 8 September 2026
Anthropic to unknown
Researcher, Anthropic (ex-OpenAI) Resigned and posted a widely viewed warning that labs are compromising oversight to keep pace; ynet reported he forfeited unvested equity. Others questioned his motives. - Chris Apps 7 September 2026
Google DeepMind to Ineffable Intelligence
Google DeepMind researcher; AlphaStar co-author Named one of six new Ineffable 'cofounders' in September 2026, joining his former DeepMind colleague David Silver; Ineffable is hiring from DeepMind and InstaDeep. - Wojciech Czarnecki 7 September 2026
Google DeepMind to Ineffable Intelligence
Google DeepMind researcher; AlphaStar co-author Named one of six new Ineffable 'cofounders' in September 2026, joining his former DeepMind colleague David Silver; Ineffable is hiring from DeepMind and InstaDeep. - Lasse Espeholt 7 September 2026
Google DeepMind to Ineffable Intelligence
Google DeepMind researcher; MetNet weather models Named one of six new Ineffable 'cofounders' in September 2026, joining his former DeepMind colleague David Silver; Ineffable is hiring from DeepMind and InstaDeep. - Alexandre Laterre 7 September 2026
InstaDeep to Ineffable Intelligence
Head of research, InstaDeep Became an Ineffable cofounder from BioNTech-owned InstaDeep, one of six cofounders added in September 2026. - Junhyuk Oh 7 September 2026
Google DeepMind to Ineffable Intelligence
Google DeepMind researcher; AlphaStar co-author Named one of six new Ineffable 'cofounders' in September 2026, joining his former DeepMind colleague David Silver; Ineffable is hiring from DeepMind and InstaDeep. - Barret Zoph 26 August 2026
OpenAI to Google DeepMind
VP of Research, OpenAI Became GDM vice president of research working on RL and post-training, about seven months after returning to OpenAI; arrived three weeks after the Hassabis/Dean reshuffle. - Lin Junyang 12 August 2026
Alibaba (Qwen) to Pragmatik Labs
Founder, Pragmatik Labs; ex-Qwen technical lead Five months after leaving Qwen he launched Shanghai-based Pragmatik Labs for agents across digital and physical worlds; angel round co-led by Gaorong and HSG with Tencent backing. - Brad Lightcap 11 August 2026
OpenAI to New venture (unannounced)
Former COO (special projects since April) Said on X he is leaving 'to start something new' after eight years; in April he had moved from COO to special projects on complex deals. - Jeff Dean 5 August 2026
Google to Discovery Loop
Chief Scientist, Google Left after 27 years on friendly terms to start Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, a public-benefit company for AI in science and engineering; Google will invest. - Demis Hassabis 5 August 2026
Google DeepMind (CEO) to Alphabet (chief scientist; GDM chair)
CEO, Google DeepMind Handed day-to-day operations to Koray Kavukcuoglu, who now heads the AI division reporting to Pichai and leads Gemini 4, to focus on the big picture; announced alongside Jeff Dean's exit. - Tino Cuellar 4 August 2026
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to Anthropic
President, Carnegie Endowment; former California Supreme Court justice Became Anthropic's first Chief Global Affairs Officer, running policy, international engagement and government relations as Anthropic's disputes with the US government… - Lilian Weng 29 July 2026
Thinking Machines Lab to OpenAI
Co-founder, Thinking Machines Lab Quit TML on 2026-07-27 citing health and startup pace; OpenAI said she will lead a top-level team accelerating internal research, including recursive self-improvement work. - Fidji Simo 9 July 2026
OpenAI to unknown
CEO of Applications (OpenAI's No. 2) Medical leave from April proved longer than expected, so she moved to a part-time advisory role, leaving a vacuum ahead of a possible OpenAI IPO. She had joined in May 2025 from Instacart. - Joshua Achiam July 2026
OpenAI to unknown
Chief futurist; former head of mission alignment Left after nearly nine years; OpenAI had disbanded his mission alignment team in early 2026 and moved him to the chief futurist role. - Johannes Heidecke July 2026
OpenAI to unknown
Head of Safety Systems, OpenAI Joined in 2021 and ran safety systems from 2024; left in a reorganization that put OpenAI's safety teams under Mia Glaese, VP of research and safety. - John Jumper 19 June 2026
Google DeepMind to Anthropic
VP and Engineering Fellow; AlphaFold co-creator, 2024 Nobel laureate Left after nearly nine years, days after Shazeer's exit. Bloomberg reported he was a key member of Google's coding-tools effort, which has struggled to win business… - Noam Shazeer 17 June 2026
Google DeepMind to OpenAI
Gemini co-lead; Google VP of engineering Announced on X, less than two years after Google's 2024 Character.AI deal brought him back; came weeks after Google I/O and as OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO. - Andrej Karpathy 19 May 2026
Eureka Labs to Anthropic
OpenAI co-founder; founder of Eureka Labs Joined the pretraining team to build a group that uses Claude to accelerate pretraining research; said the next few years at the LLM frontier will be especially formative. - Ross Nordeen 6 May 2026
xAI to Anthropic
Founding member of xAI; ex-Tesla Announced he was joining Anthropic in early May 2026, the same day Anthropic struck its deal to rent xAI's Colossus 1 data center. He had left xAI on 2026-03-27. - David Silver 27 April 2026
Google DeepMind to Ineffable Intelligence
Head of reinforcement learning, Google DeepMind; AlphaGo/AlphaZero lead Left after more than a decade to found London's Ineffable Intelligence, which raised $1.1B at a $5.1B valuation (Sequoia, Lightspeed) to build a 'superlearner' that… - Bill Peebles 17 April 2026
OpenAI to unknown
Head of Sora Left after three years as OpenAI shut down Sora (about $1M a day in compute, per TechCrunch) and refocused on enterprise AI and a 'superapp'. - Kevin Weil 17 April 2026
OpenAI to AI science startup (reported)
VP, OpenAI for Science; former CPO OpenAI for Science was absorbed into other research teams as OpenAI cut 'side quests'; he left a day after GPT-Rosalind shipped. BI says he now runs a science startup seeking a $750M+ valuation. - Ross Nordeen 27 March 2026
xAI to unknown
xAI co-founder; Musk's right-hand operator Last of the 11 co-founders besides Musk to leave, per Business Insider; came from Tesla Autopilot and helped run Twitter cuts. Musk said xAI would be rebuilt from the foundations. - Manuel Kroiss 25 March 2026
xAI to unknown
xAI co-founder; led pretraining Told colleagues he was leaving the week of 2026-03-23; led pretraining and reported directly to Musk. - Mustafa Suleyman 17 March 2026
Microsoft AI (Copilot product lead) to Microsoft AI (superintelligence and models)
EVP and CEO, Microsoft AI Nadella unified Copilot under Jacob Andreou (EVP, ex-Snap) so Suleyman can focus on frontier models and the superintelligence effort, still reporting to Nadella. - Guodong Zhang 12 March 2026
xAI to unknown
xAI co-founder; head of Grok Imagine and Grok Code Confirmed last day on 2026-03-12; FT reported Musk blamed him for problems with the coding product and relieved him of main duties amid a SpaceX/Tesla audit. - Pascale Fung 10 March 2026
Meta to AMI Labs
Senior director of AI research, Meta Became AMI's chief research and innovation officer, another senior FAIR alumna following LeCun out of Meta. - Alexandre LeBrun 10 March 2026
Nabla to AMI Labs
Founder and CEO of Nabla (medical AI) Runs AMI day to day as CEO while LeCun is executive chair; previously founded and ran French medical-AI startup Nabla. - Yann LeCun 10 March 2026
Meta to AMI Labs
Executive chairman, AMI Labs AMI (Advanced Machine Intelligence) announced a $1.03B seed at $3.5B pre-money to build world models; Alexandre LeBrun is CEO and LeCun stays an NYU professor. - Michael Rabbat 10 March 2026
Meta to AMI Labs
Director of research science, Meta Joined AMI as VP of world models; founding team is drawn almost entirely from Meta's AI research organisation (Sifted reported the first hires in January 2026). - Saining Xie 10 March 2026
Google DeepMind to AMI Labs
Research scientist, Google DeepMind Became AMI's chief science officer; one of the hires from rival labs (Meta and DeepMind) that Sifted flagged in January 2026. - Caitlin Kalinowski 7 March 2026
OpenAI to unknown
Head of hardware and robotics, OpenAI Resigned over OpenAI's Pentagon deal days after Anthropic's talks collapsed, saying surveillance and lethal autonomy deserved more deliberation; she later said her objection was mainly governance. - Lin Junyang 4 March 2026
Alibaba (Qwen) to unknown
Technical lead, Qwen Resigned on 2026-03-03 ('me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen'); Tongyi Lab was reorganizing its model teams, and other Qwen members were reported to resign the same week. - Zihang Dai March 2026
xAI to unknown
xAI co-founder; member of technical staff Left in the second week of March 2026, days before Guodong Zhang, as Musk reshuffled xAI with 'fixers' from SpaceX and Tesla and said it was being 'rebuilt from the foundations up'. - Ross Girshick 25 February 2026
Vercept to Anthropic
Co-founder, Vercept (with Kiana Ehsani, Luca Weihs) Anthropic acquired Vercept and folded its perception and computer-use team in, winding down the external product; Sonnet models had gone from under 15% to 72.5% on OSWorld. - Peter Steinberger 15 February 2026
OpenClaw (independent) to OpenAI
Creator of OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot) Said teaming with OpenAI was the fastest way to bring agents to everyone; Altman said he will drive next-generation personal agents while OpenClaw moves to an OpenAI-supported open-source… - Zoe Hitzig 11 February 2026
OpenAI to unknown
Researcher, OpenAI (two years) Resigned via a New York Times essay citing deep reservations about ChatGPT advertising and the manipulation risk of its archive of intimate user data. - Jimmy Ba 10 February 2026
xAI to unknown
xAI co-founder; University of Toronto professor Left one day after Tony Wu, thanking Musk for letting him co-found the company; CNBC credited him with research behind Grok 4. Second co-founder exit in two days. - Ryan Beiermeister 10 February 2026
OpenAI to unknown
Top safety executive, OpenAI WSJ reported she was fired for alleged discrimination, which she called false, after opposing ChatGPT's 'adult mode'; OpenAI said the firing was unrelated to any issue she raised. - Mrinank Sharma 9 February 2026
Anthropic to unknown
Head of Safeguards Research, Anthropic Posted a letter warning 'the world is in peril' and that it is hard to let values govern actions; Anthropic said he was not head of safety or of broader safeguards. - Tony (Yuhuai) Wu 9 February 2026
xAI to unknown
xAI co-founder; led reasoning Announced exit on X a week after SpaceX acquired xAI; Entrepreneur noted six of the 12-person founding team had gone, five in the last year, and called the splits amicable. - Toby Pohlen February 2026
xAI to unknown
xAI co-founder Left in February 2026 amid the post-SpaceX restructuring of xAI into four teams; BI counted eight co-founder exits since January by late March. - Ahmad Al-Dahle 14 January 2026
Meta to Airbnb
Co-head of AI products; former head of GenAI, Meta Became Airbnb CTO after Meta split its GenAI unit when Llama 4 was poorly received; earlier spent 16 years at Apple. - Luke Metz 14 January 2026
Thinking Machines Lab to OpenAI
Co-founder, Thinking Machines Lab Left Thinking Machines for OpenAI alongside Barret Zoph and Sam Schoenholz, less than a year after the lab's February 2025 launch; OpenAI said the move had been in the works for weeks. - Barret Zoph 14 January 2026
Thinking Machines Lab to OpenAI
Co-founder and CTO, Thinking Machines Lab Rejoined OpenAI with Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz; OpenAI's Fidji Simo said it had been 'in the works for several weeks'. Wired reported the split was not amicable. Soumith Chintala became TML CTO. - Greg Yang January 2026
xAI to unknown
xAI co-founder Stepped back from his role to focus on a battle with Lyme disease, the first co-founder exit of 2026 and the start of the xAI founder exodus after the SpaceX deal. - John Giannandrea 1 December 2025
Apple to unknown
SVP Machine Learning and AI Strategy Apple announced he would step down and retire in spring 2026 after the delayed Siri overhaul; his remaining teams were split between Federighi, Khan and Cue. - Amar Subramanya 1 December 2025
Microsoft to Apple
Microsoft AI executive; 16-year Google veteran Hired as VP of AI under Craig Federighi to run foundation models, ML and AI safety, five months after leaving Google after 16 years for Microsoft. - Aaron Saunders 20 November 2025
Boston Dynamics to Google DeepMind
CTO, Boston Dynamics Hired as VP of hardware engineering as DeepMind pursues Gemini as an 'Android' for robots across body types, humanoid and not. - Luo Fuli 12 November 2025
DeepSeek to Xiaomi
Core developer, DeepSeek Joined Xiaomi to lead its MiMo model team (reported as focused on spatial intelligence), a rare public move of a DeepSeek core developer to another Chinese company. - Yann LeCun 11 November 2025
Meta to AMI Labs
Chief AI Scientist; FAIR founder FT reported he planned to leave and build a world-models startup after Zuckerberg overhauled AI around MSL when Llama 4 lagged. He had told Zuckerberg in November 2025. - Ke Yang 15 October 2025
Apple to Meta Superintelligence Labs
Head of Apple's AKI (Siri answers/search) group Left weeks after taking over AKI from Robby Walker; Gurman counted over a dozen senior Apple AI exits that year, many from Foundation Models. - Andrew Tulloch 11 October 2025
Thinking Machines Lab to Meta Superintelligence Labs
Co-founder, Thinking Machines Lab Told TML staff he was leaving; TML cited personal reasons. WSJ had reported Meta first tried to buy TML, then offered him a package of up to $1.5B over six-plus years, which Meta called inaccurate. - Rahul Patil 7 October 2025
Stripe to Anthropic
CTO, Stripe Became CTO overseeing product, compute, infrastructure, inference, data science and security as Claude scaled; co-founder Sam McCandlish became Chief Architect, keeping pretraining and adding RL infrastructure. - Liam Fedus September 2025
OpenAI to Periodic Labs
VP of research and post-training, OpenAI Left OpenAI in March 2025 and co-founded Periodic Labs in September to build an AI scientist; Periodic now runs high-throughput materials labs to generate training data. - Ethan Knight 26 August 2025
Meta Superintelligence Labs to OpenAI
Researcher; joined Meta from xAI Left Meta's core TBD Lab for OpenAI after under a month; Meta confirmed to The Verge he left the core team. - Chaya Nayak 26 August 2025
Meta to OpenAI
Director of generative AI product management, Meta Leaving after nearly a decade at Meta to work on special initiatives at OpenAI, per two sources cited by Wired. - Avi Verma 26 August 2025
Meta Superintelligence Labs to OpenAI
OpenAI researcher who joined Meta's lab Left MSL for OpenAI after under a month, per Wired; Meta said people sometimes decide to stay in their current job during intense recruiting. - Rishabh Agarwal 25 August 2025
Meta Superintelligence Labs to unknown
Researcher, Meta superintelligence organisation Announced exit on X after 7.5 years across Google Brain, DeepMind and Meta, wanting 'a different kind of risk'; praised the lab's talent and compute density. - Joelle Pineau 14 August 2025
Meta to Cohere
Chief AI Officer (first), Cohere Cohere named the former FAIR head its first chief AI officer to direct research and product from Montreal, alongside a $500M raise at $6.8B; she also oversees Cohere Labs after Sara Hooker's exit. - Humanloop founding team (Raza, Jordan, Peter) August 2025
Humanloop to Anthropic
Founders, Humanloop (LLM evals and prompt platform) Humanloop's team (Raza, Jordan, Peter) joined Anthropic and sunset the LLM evaluation and prompt-management platform. - Tom Gunter 17 July 2025
Apple to Meta Superintelligence Labs
Senior member, Apple Foundation Models team One of two Pang subordinates Bloomberg said were joining MSL; Decrypt describes him as Pang's top deputy who had left in June. Bloomberg called it continuing turmoil at Apple's models team. - Mark Lee 17 July 2025
Apple to Meta Superintelligence Labs
Apple Foundation Models researcher; Pang's first Apple hire Joined MSL with Tom Gunter after their boss Ruoming Pang; Apple was reportedly offering engineers raises but far below Meta's offers. - Douglas Chen 11 July 2025
Windsurf to Google DeepMind
Co-founder, Windsurf Joined Google with Varun Mohan in the licensing-and-hiring deal; co-founders' share was a substantial portion of the roughly $1.2B compensation half (TechCrunch). - Varun Mohan 11 July 2025
Windsurf to Google DeepMind
Co-founder and CEO, Windsurf (Codeium) Google paid $2.4B to license Windsurf tech and hire Mohan, Douglas Chen and about 40 staff after OpenAI's $3B purchase fell apart; Windsurf's remaining employees got little (TechCrunch). - Ruoming Pang 7 July 2025
Apple to Meta Superintelligence Labs
Head of Apple Foundation Models (about 100 engineers) Apple's top models executive left for MSL weeks after Meta's Scale deal; Bloomberg reported a package above $200M. His team powers Apple Intelligence summaries and Genmoji. - Daniel Gross 3 July 2025
Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) to Meta Superintelligence Labs
Co-founder and CEO, Safe Superintelligence Left SSI after Sutskever rebuffed Meta's earlier bid to acquire it; Sutskever became CEO and said SSI is not for sale. Gross works on products under Wang. - Hyung Won Chung July 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI research scientist One of three OpenAI research scientists who left for Meta's lab in July 2025, alongside Jason Wei and Zhiqing Sun. - Jason Wei July 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI research scientist; o1 and deep research Left in July with Hyung Won Chung and Zhiqing Sun, and their LinkedIn post cited building from a clean slate with a talent-dense team. - Zhiqing Sun July 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI research scientist Left OpenAI for Meta's Superintelligence Labs in July 2025, one of at least seven researchers OpenAI lost to Meta that year (BI). - Nat Friedman 30 June 2025
NFDG (venture fund) to Meta Superintelligence Labs
Former GitHub CEO; co-founder of NFDG fund Co-leads MSL's products and applied research under Wang; Meta also took a stake in the NFDG fund he ran with Daniel Gross. - Hongyu Ren 30 June 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI post-training group lead Meta's memo credits him as co-creator of GPT-4o, 4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, o3 and o4-mini; one of the OpenAI reasoning cohort that moved in June 2025. - Huiwen Chang 30 June 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI researcher; GPT-4o image generation Co-creator of GPT-4o image generation per Meta's memo; earlier invented MaskIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research. - Ji Lin 30 June 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI researcher; o3/o4-mini and Operator reasoning stack Meta's memo credits him on o3, o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5 and the Operator reasoning stack. - Jiahui Yu 30 June 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI perception lead; former Gemini multimodal co-lead Credited in Meta's memo as co-creator of o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o; BI dates his exit to late June 2025. - Pei Sun 30 June 2025
Google DeepMind to Meta Superintelligence Labs
Gemini post-training, coding and reasoning researcher Worked on Gemini post-training, coding and reasoning after building Waymo's last two generations of perception models, per Meta's memo. - Joel Pobar 30 June 2025
Anthropic to Meta Superintelligence Labs
Inference engineer, Anthropic; 11-year Meta veteran Returned to Meta from Anthropic's inference team after 11 earlier years at Meta (HHVM, Hack, Flow, ML tooling); the memo's only Anthropic hire. - Jack Rae 30 June 2025
Google DeepMind to Meta Superintelligence Labs
Gemini pretraining tech lead; led Gopher and Chinchilla Left Google DeepMind where he led Gemini pretraining and contributed to Gemini 2.5 reasoning; one of the MSL memo's named hires from Google. - Johan Schalkwyk 30 June 2025
Sesame to Meta Superintelligence Labs
Former Google Fellow; Sesame technical lead Early Sesame contributor and technical lead for its Maya voice model, listed in Meta's June 2025 memo; Bloomberg reported him alongside Rae and Bansal. - Shuchao Bi 30 June 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI multimodal post-training lead Co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini per Meta's memo; left OpenAI in June 2025 to work on RL, post-training and agents (BI). - Shengjia Zhao 30 June 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI researcher; ChatGPT, GPT-4, o-series contributor Named MSL chief scientist on 2025-07-25. Wired reported he had signed paperwork to return to OpenAI before Meta formalized the title; Meta says he co-founded MSL from day one. - Trapit Bansal 26 June 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI researcher; early RL-on-chain-of-thought work Listed as a foundational contributor on o1 and helped start OpenAI's RL work with Sutskever; Meta wanted him for its first reasoning model. OpenAI confirmed he left. - Lucas Beyer 25 June 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI Zurich researcher; multimodality One of three OpenAI Zurich multimodal researchers who joined Meta, per WSJ via TechCrunch; Beyer tweeted they did not get a $100M sign-on, calling that report fake news. - Alexander Kolesnikov 25 June 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI Zurich researcher; multimodality Joined Meta's superintelligence team with Lucas Beyer and Xiaohua Zhai from OpenAI's Zurich office, per WSJ as relayed by TechCrunch. - Xiaohua Zhai 25 June 2025
OpenAI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
OpenAI Zurich researcher; multimodality Third of the OpenAI Zurich trio hired into Meta's superintelligence team in June 2025, per WSJ as relayed by TechCrunch. - Alexandr Wang 12 June 2025
Scale AI to Meta Superintelligence Labs
Founder and CEO, Scale AI Meta took a 49% stake in Scale AI and made Wang chief AI officer leading MSL; Jason Droege became Scale CEO. Meta had earlier tried and failed to buy SSI, Thinking Machines and Perplexity. - Jony Ive 21 May 2025
io to OpenAI
Former Apple chief design officer; founder of io OpenAI bought Ive's hardware startup io in a deal the BBC put at $6.5B; Ive takes on deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI to build a new family of AI devices. - Joelle Pineau May 2025
Meta to unknown
Vice president of AI research; head of FAIR Left in May 2025, before Meta's superintelligence hiring wave; The Verge noted FAIR's research took a backseat afterward and FAIR was hit by October's 600-role AI cuts. - Fidji Simo May 2025
Instacart to OpenAI
CEO of Instacart Joined as CEO of Applications, a new role consolidating business and product under Altman; COO Lightcap, CFO Friar and CPO Weil began reporting to her while Altman focused on research, compute and safety. - Miles Brundage 23 October 2024
OpenAI to unknown
Senior Advisor for AGI Readiness, OpenAI Left after six-plus years to work on industry-wide AI policy with more freedom to publish and more independence; planned to start or join a nonprofit. - Durk Kingma 1 October 2024
Google DeepMind to Anthropic
OpenAI founding team member; Google Brain/DeepMind researcher Third marquee ex-OpenAI hire after Leike and Schulman; said Anthropic's approach resonates with his beliefs. Works mostly remotely from the Netherlands. - Mira Murati 25 September 2024
OpenAI to unknown
Chief Technology Officer Said she was stepping away to do her own exploration after six and a half years; announced a week before DevDay. She later founded Thinking Machines Lab. - Pieter Abbeel 30 August 2024
Covariant to Amazon
Co-founder and chief scientist, Covariant Amazon hired Abbeel, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan and about a quarter of Covariant staff and took a non-exclusive license to its robot foundation models. - John Schulman 5 August 2024
OpenAI to Anthropic
OpenAI co-founder; head of post-training Said he wanted to deepen his focus on AI alignment and do more hands-on technical work; Brockman announced a sabbatical the same week and Peter Deng had already left. - Daniel De Freitas 2 August 2024
Character.AI to Google DeepMind
Co-founder and President, Character.AI; Meena/LaMDA lead Returned to Google with Noam Shazeer when Google licensed Character.AI's technology and hired part of its research team. - Noam Shazeer 2 August 2024
Character.AI to Google DeepMind
Co-founder and CEO, Character.AI; Transformer co-author Google brought back Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas plus some Character researchers under a licensing deal, the third big reverse acquihire after Inflection and Adept; he later co-led… - Andrej Karpathy 16 July 2024
OpenAI to Eureka Labs
Founder, Eureka Labs Launched an AI-native school whose first product, LLM101n, teaches students to train their own small AI, with a teacher-plus-AI-teaching-assistant model. - David Luan 28 June 2024
Adept to Amazon
Co-founder and CEO, Adept Amazon licensed Adept's tech and hired Luan and co-founders including Augustus Odena (about two-thirds of staff per Amazon); Luan works under Rohit Prasad's AGI team on agents. - Ilya Sutskever 19 June 2024
OpenAI to Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI)
Co-founder and Chief Scientist, SSI Launched SSI with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy around 'one goal and one product', safe superintelligence, structured to be insulated from product cycles and short-term commercial pressure. - Jan Leike 28 May 2024
OpenAI to Anthropic
Co-lead of OpenAI Superalignment Resigned from OpenAI earlier in May citing safety concerns and compute; joined Anthropic to work on scalable oversight, weak-to-strong generalization and automated alignment research. - Mike Krieger 15 May 2024
Artifact to Anthropic
Instagram and Artifact co-founder Became Anthropic's first chief product officer, owning product engineering, management and design as Claude expanded into consumer apps and enterprise subscriptions. - Ilya Sutskever 14 May 2024
OpenAI to unknown
Co-founder and Chief Scientist Left six months after backing Altman's brief ouster; said he would work on a project personally meaningful to him. Jakub Pachocki, director of research, replaced him as chief scientist. - Emad Mostaque 23 March 2024
Stability AI to unknown
Founder and CEO, Stability AI Resigned as CEO and director 'to pursue decentralized AI'; COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte became interim co-CEOs. Fortune reported a falling-out with investors Coatue and Lightspeed. - Transformer paper authors (Vaswani, Shazeer, Parmar, Uszkoreit, Jones, Gomez, Kaiser, Polosukhin) 20 March 2024
Google to Adept/Essential AI, Character.AI, Inceptive, Sakana AI, Cohere, OpenAI, Near
Authors of 'Attention Is All You Need' (Google, 2017) By March 2024 all eight authors had left Google. Seven founded companies (Parmar and Vaswani at Adept then Essential AI) and Lukasz Kaiser joined OpenAI, per Wired. A textbook case of… - Karen Simonyan 19 March 2024
Inflection AI to Microsoft AI
Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Inflection AI; AlphaZero contributor Became Microsoft AI's chief scientist reporting to Suleyman as part of the Inflection team move. - Mustafa Suleyman 19 March 2024
Inflection AI to Microsoft AI
Co-founder and CEO, Inflection AI Nadella formed Microsoft AI with Suleyman as EVP and CEO and Karen Simonyan as chief scientist, hiring several Inflection researchers. Seen as a reverse acquihire sidestepping merger review. - Andrej Karpathy 13 February 2024
OpenAI to unknown
Research scientist, OpenAI Left for a second time, saying his exit was 'not a result of any particular event, issue or drama'. He then founded the education startup Eureka Labs. - Sam Altman 21 November 2023
Microsoft (offered) to OpenAI
CEO, OpenAI After a five-day board coup, OpenAI agreed in principle for him to return with Brockman under a new board of Bret Taylor, Larry Summers and Adam D'Angelo, with an outside investigation planned. - Sam Altman 17 November 2023
OpenAI to Microsoft (offered, not taken)
CEO, OpenAI Board ousted him over claims he was not 'consistently candid'; Microsoft hired him and Brockman to lead a new AI research team, and 500+ OpenAI staff threatened to follow before he was reinstated. - Greg Brockman 17 November 2023
OpenAI to Microsoft (announced), then OpenAI
President, OpenAI Removed as chairman and quit in protest of Altman's firing, was announced as joining Microsoft with Altman, then returned with him on 2023-11-21. - Llion Jones July 2023
Google to Sakana AI
Transformer co-author; ex-Google Co-founded Tokyo-based Sakana AI with David Ha and Ren Ito; Wired listed it among the transformer-author startups, then valued at about $200M. - Geoffrey Hinton 1 May 2023
Google to unknown
Google VP and Engineering Fellow; Turing Award winner Resigned after more than a decade at Google to speak freely about AI risks, telling the NYT part of him regrets his life's work; he said he notified Google last month. - Arthur Mensch 28 April 2023
Google DeepMind to Mistral AI
Researcher, DeepMind Paris (with Guillaume Lample and Timothee Lacroix, ex-Meta) Three French researchers founded Mistral in April 2023 as an open competitor to US labs; it raised a record 105M euro seed within weeks. Founders' prior labs… - Jeff Dean 20 April 2023
Google Brain to Google DeepMind
Head of Google AI; Google Brain co-founder Alphabet merged Brain and DeepMind; Pichai made Dean chief scientist reporting to him, to lead the most strategic AI projects starting with powerful multimodal models. - Andrej Karpathy February 2023
Tesla (sabbatical) to OpenAI
Former Tesla Director of AI Went back to OpenAI after leaving Tesla in 2022, his second stint after the founding years; he left again in February 2024. Month of return from other reporting. - Andrej Karpathy 13 July 2022
Tesla to unknown
Director of AI and Autopilot, Tesla Left after about five years, citing a wish to revisit technical work in AI, open source and education; he had just taken a months-long sabbatical. He later rejoined OpenAI briefly. - Ian Goodfellow May 2022
Apple to Google DeepMind
Director of machine learning, Apple Special Projects Group Quit over Apple's return-to-office rule, saying more flexibility would have been best for his team, and rejoined Google's DeepMind as an individual contributor. - Mustafa Suleyman 8 March 2022
Google to Inflection AI
VP, Google; DeepMind co-founder Quit his Google VP role weeks earlier and co-founded Inflection with Reid Hoffman and former DeepMind researcher Karen Simonyan, targeting software that makes computers easier to talk to; he led as CEO. - Noam Shazeer October 2021
Google to Character.AI
Google engineer since 2000; Transformer co-author Left Google in October 2021 and co-founded Character.AI with Daniel De Freitas after Google declined to release their chatbot aggressively; Google brought him back in 2024. - Dario Amodei 28 May 2021
OpenAI to Anthropic
VP of Research, OpenAI Struck out months earlier with sister Daniela to build steerable, interpretable and reliable AI, and announced Anthropic with $124M. Founders say they left to build a safety-first company from the ground up (Vox). - Daniela Amodei 28 May 2021
OpenAI to Anthropic
VP of Safety and Policy, OpenAI Co-founded Anthropic with her brother Dario, which TechCrunch's launch coverage describes as a safety-focused research company built by former OpenAI staff. - Margaret Mitchell 19 February 2021
Google to unknown
Founder and former co-lead, Google Ethical AI Google said a review found code-of-conduct and security violations, including exfiltrating confidential documents; she had lost account access in January after searching for evidence about… - Timnit Gebru 2 December 2020
Google to unknown
Co-lead, Google Ethical AI team Says Google fired her after blocking a paper on bias and risks of large language models; Google said she resigned. Over 1,200 Googlers condemned the exit, and she later launched an independent institute. - Ian Goodfellow March 2019
Google to Apple
Senior researcher, Google; GAN inventor Moved from Google to Apple in March 2019 as director of machine learning in the Special Projects Group, a year after Apple hired Giannandrea; formerly at OpenAI. - John Giannandrea 3 April 2018
Google to Apple
Head of Google search and AI (SVP) Left Google after two years as Google split his role, giving Jeff Dean all of Google's AI efforts; Apple hired him to run its AI group and he led it until his December 2025 retirement announcement. - Elon Musk 21 February 2018
OpenAI to unknown
OpenAI co-founder and board member OpenAI said leaving would remove a future conflict as Tesla grew more AI-focused; Observer adds a failed attempt to fold OpenAI into Tesla. He kept advising and donating, then sued OpenAI years later. - Andrej Karpathy 20 June 2017
OpenAI to Tesla
Research scientist, OpenAI Musk, a board member at both organizations, hired him as Director of AI and Autopilot Vision reporting directly to Musk; he led the Autopilot vision team for about five years. - Greg Brockman December 2015
Stripe to OpenAI
CTO, Stripe Talked with Altman through Stripe's Patrick Collison, then co-founded OpenAI as CTO with Musk, Sutskever and others; he is now president and briefly quit during Altman's November 2023 ouster. - Ilya Sutskever December 2015
Google Brain to OpenAI
Research assistant, Google (via DNNresearch acquisition) Musk recruited him in 2015, which Sutskever later called one of the toughest recruiting battles he had faced. He started as research director and became chief scientist in 2018.