John Jumper to leave Google DeepMind for Anthropic

A pedestrian passes by the Google office in New York City on Jan. 25, 2023. Leonardo Munoz | View Press | Getty Images Senior research scientist John Jumper said on Friday he would leave Google DeepMind to join AI startup Anthropic, the latest high-profile departure at the Big Tech giant's AI research and development division. Jumper, who won a Nobel prize alongside Google's Demis Hassabis in 2024, is best known as the co-creator of AlphaFold, a breakthrough AI that has predicted over 200 million protein structures, cutting years off biological and medical research. "After nearly nine years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic," Jumper said in a post on X. Technology giants including Meta and Alphabet , along with AI upstarts such as Anthropic and OpenAI are locked in a fierce talent war, competing for elite researchers as they race to build next-generation AI systems. Jumper's surprise departure comes just days after Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini AI models, said he would leave the company to join IPO-bound OpenAI. "What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world, and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine, lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity," Hassabis said in a reply to Jumper's post. Jumper serves as VP, Engineering Fellow, at Google DeepMind, according to his LinkedIn page. …