John Jumper, the Nobel laureate who led Google DeepMind's AlphaFold project, said on June 19 that he is leaving the company after nearly nine years to join Anthropic. His exit lands days after Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer announced his own move to OpenAI, leaving Google down two of the people most responsible for its AI standing.
Two exits, one week
Jumper announced the move on his X account, noting he'd take some time to recharge first. He thanked Demis Hassabis for handing him the AlphaFold team just six months out of his PhD, which is the kind of detail that makes the departure sting more, not less. Jumper and Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, the system that predicted the structures of more than 200 million proteins and gave DeepMind its strongest claim to science that actually mattered outside the lab.
Hassabis, for his part, called their work an "extraordinary partnership" and said AlphaFold had "changed the world," which is the expected thing for a CEO to say when a Nobel winner walks out the door, though in this case the benchmark of 200 million protein structures makes it hard to argue with.
The Shazeer problem came first
A day earlier, Noam Shazeer told colleagues he was joining OpenAI. CNBC reported the announcement, which Shazeer posted on X with the usual notes about a difficult decision and a proud team.
That one is harder for Google to shrug off. Shazeer co-authored the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture, the thing nearly every modern language model is built on, Gemini and GPT and Claude included. Google reportedly paid around $2.7 billion in August 2024 to pull him back from Character.AI. Less than two years later he's gone, which either says something about money's limits or about where Shazeer thinks the interesting work is now.
Not the first to go
Before either of these, DeepMind lost David Silver, a lead researcher behind AlphaGo and AlphaZero, who left to start his own company focused on world models and reinforcement learning, according to The Decoder. Three senior departures in short order is a pattern, not a coincidence, even if Google would rather frame each as an individual choice.
What Jumper will actually do at Anthropic hasn't been spelled out. The company has a science event scheduled for June 30, which is the next concrete date to watch for any detail on his role.
