Nobel laureate John Jumper is leaving DeepMind for rival Anthropic

John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on AlphaFold, said he is leaving Google DeepMind to join Anthropic after nearly nine years. His exit follows another high-profile DeepMind departure this week, with Character AI co-founder Noam Shazeer moving to OpenAI.

Jumper’s move highlights intensifying competition for elite AI researchers as Anthropic and OpenAI challenge Google’s long-standing research bench. The departures could pressure DeepMind at a time when frontier labs are racing to turn scientific breakthroughs and coding tools into commercial AI products.