Nobel laureate John Jumper leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic

What happened

John Jumper, VP and Engineering Fellow at Google DeepMind, announced via X on 19 June 2026 that he is moving to Anthropic. The AlphaFold co-creator and 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry (jointly with Demis Hassabis) was also a key member of Google's AI coding modeling team.

Context and impact

The move comes days after Noam Shazeer (Transformer co-author) left Google DeepMind for OpenAI. For Google it is a serious erosion of top talent at a time when it is fighting on multiple fronts — agentic AI and coding models — against OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. For Anthropic it is a strong pull signal: the company is aggressively recruiting top scientific names despite ongoing geopolitical friction with the US administration.

Details

• Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold (with Hassabis)
• ~9 years at DeepMind as VP and Engineering Fellow
• A week earlier, Noam Shazeer left Google for OpenAI