ME AI message, June 25 (UTC+8): Google DeepMind has once again lost key AI talent, as Gemini core contributors Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel plan to join Anthropic.
In the past several days, Google has lost John Jumper, head of the AlphaFold team and 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, who moved to Anthropic, as well as Noam Shazeer, co-lead of Gemini, who joined OpenAI as Head of Architecture Research.
Additionally, senior research engineer Arthur Conmy, who has been focused on Gemini 2.5 and AI coding, has announced he will move from London to San Francisco to join Anthropic, where he will work on alignment during model training; Canadian researcher Rishub Jain, who spent seven years at DeepMind, has also recently left and plans to found a nonprofit focused on scalable and human-supervised AI safety.
The reallocation of computing resources directly led to Shazeer's departure. Prior to leaving, Google redistributed the computing resources originally assigned to Shazeer’s team to DeepMind’s London pretraining team, in an effort to optimize cross-team collaboration. This left Shazeer’s ongoing research on variant Transformer architectures hindered by insufficient computational power.
The consecutive departure of multiple scientists directly confirms DeepMind’s current retention crisis, forcing CEO Demis Hassabis to publicly acknowledge at the Cannes Lions Festival that competition for AI talent is now the most intense in the history of the tech industry. According to industry analysis by SignalFire, DeepMind engineers are 11 times more likely to leave for Anthropic than to move back to Google; meanwhile, Anthropic, which recently completed its Series H funding round at a $965 billion valuation, is siphoning talent from Google through high salaries, equity options, and autonomous research environments.
Due to non-compete agreements under UK law that have lengthy durations, researchers from London, including Jumper, may not be able to officially begin working at Anthropic until the end of 2026 or 2027. With Jumper’s departure, core members of the AlphaFold team have been leaving in recent months. Some have moved to Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company spun out by Google, while others have chosen to follow Jumper to Anthropic. Anthropic is actively expanding into life sciences and healthcare, and its $965 billion valuation, along with its planned fall IPO, offer employees significant financial upside.（Source: Bloomberg）