Nobel Laureate John Jumper Leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic, the Second AI Star to Exit Google in a Week
AlphaFold co-creator John Jumper is leaving DeepMind after nearly nine years, days after Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer departed for OpenAI.
Overview
John Jumper, who shared a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on the protein-structure model AlphaFold, is leaving Google DeepMind for the rival lab Anthropic. Jumper announced the move on Friday after “nearly 9 years” at Google DeepMind, according to TechCrunch. His departure lands the same week that Noam Shazeer, a co-founder of Character AI, announced he was leaving DeepMind for OpenAI, as also reported by TechCrunch — making Jumper the second high-profile AI researcher to exit Google for a rival in a matter of days.
What We Know
Jumper and DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in 2024 for their work on AlphaFold, an AI model that can predict the 3D structure of proteins based on their genetic sequences, according to TechCrunch. The pair shared that year’s chemistry prize with David Baker, a scientist at the University of Washington who pioneered the creation of entirely new proteins, as reported by Fortune. The award recognized the AlphaFold 2 model, which in 2020 “stunned the scientific world with its ability to correctly predict the structure of almost all known proteins from their DNA sequences,” according to Fortune, which described Jumper as a director at DeepMind who led the company’s efforts to build AI models that could predict protein structures.
In announcing the move, Jumper credited DeepMind with shaping his career. Hassabis “took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD, and the entire GDM team taught me so much about how to do great science,” Jumper wrote in remarks reproduced by TechCrunch. He added: “GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.”
The back-to-back exits drew a market reaction. Alphabet shares fell on Monday in what CNBC described as the company’s worst day on the stock market in over a year, as the departures of two prominent AI researchers fed concerns about Google’s position in the AI race.
What We Don’t Know
Jumper has not said publicly what he will work on at Anthropic, and the company has not detailed his role. The timing of his start date is also unclear. TechCrunch did not report what Shazeer’s specific responsibilities will be at OpenAI either, and it remains to be seen whether the two departures signal a broader wave of attrition from Google’s AI organization or are isolated moves.
Analysis
The departures land at a sensitive moment for Google. AlphaFold is among DeepMind’s most celebrated achievements, and Jumper’s Nobel cemented the lab’s reputation as a place where fundamental science and machine learning intersect. Losing the researcher who led that effort to Anthropic — a lab Google itself has invested in — underscores how fierce the competition for senior AI talent has become, with the people who can build and lead frontier research efforts now among the industry’s scarcest resources.