Nobel Laureate John Jumper Leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic
Google DeepMind is watching its top talent walk out the door, and the latest to go is one of its most decorated. John Jumper, the Nobel Prize winning researcher who led the AlphaFold project, has confirmed that John Jumper leaves Google DeepMind after nearly nine years, heading to rival AI lab Anthropic.
Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for their work on AlphaFold, the AI system that revolutionised how scientists predict protein structures. Hassabis publicly acknowledged the loss, describing their work together as an “extraordinary partnership” and saying AlphaFold had “changed the world.”
The departure stings more because of its timing. Just days earlier, Noam Shazeer, co-lead of the Gemini project, left for OpenAI, one of the key architects behind Google’s most advanced reasoning models. Weeks before that, David Silver, the lead researcher behind AlphaGo and AlphaZero, departed to found his own AI startup focused on world models and reinforcement learning. That is three of Google’s most prominent AI minds gone within months.
The brain drain comes at an awkward moment for Google. Gemini 3.5 Pro is reportedly set to launch by the end of June, but early insider signals suggest it may struggle to match what Anthropic and OpenAI are currently shipping.
