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Nobel Laureate John Jumper Leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic
AlphaFold co-creator and Nobel laureate in chemistry John Jumper is leaving Google DeepMind for Anthropic after nearly nine years, just a day after Gemini co-creator Noam Shazeer departed for OpenAI.
John Jumper, one of the creators of the AlphaFold protein-structure system and a Nobel laureate in chemistry, has announced his departure from Google DeepMind. After nearly nine years at Demis Hassabis's lab, the scientist is moving to rival Anthropic, making him the most high-profile face yet of a months-long wave of AI researcher exits from Google.
Jumper joined DeepMind just six months after completing his PhD in theoretical chemistry at the University of Chicago. He led the team that built AlphaFold, a system that predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. The AlphaFold database eventually grew to cover more than 200 million protein structures and is now used by over 2 million scientists in 190 countries, including in work on malaria vaccines, cancer therapies, and research into drug-resistant bacteria.
Who Is John Jumper
Born in 1985, Jumper received a Marshall Scholarship to study at Cambridge and earned his PhD at the University of Chicago. In 2024, alongside Demis Hassabis and David Baker, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving the protein structure prediction problem, making him one of the youngest chemistry Nobel laureates in more than seventy years.
Demis Hassabis took a real risk letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after I finished my PhD - John Jumper
A Wave of DeepMind Exits
Jumper's departure, announced on June 19, coincided with another high-profile loss for Google. A day earlier, the company lost Noam Shazeer, co-creator of the Gemini models and co-founder of Character.AI, who chose to join OpenAI. According to Bloomberg, both researchers were among the most recognizable figures at Hassabis's lab.
The market reaction was immediate. Google shares dropped more than 5 percent on Monday following both announcements, and commentators openly began asking whether DeepMind can hold onto its lead in the race for top AI research talent.
What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world and showed the industry what's possible with AI in science and medicine - Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind
Why Anthropic
Anthropic has not disclosed what role Jumper will take on, but the move fits the company's strategy of expanding into the life sciences. In April, Anthropic acquired the biotech startup Coefficient Bio for 400 million dollars, a company with fewer than ten researchers whose ranks included alumni of Genentech.
The scale of the talent flow from Google to Anthropic is markedly asymmetric, according to an analysis by the fund SignalFire: DeepMind engineers are almost eleven times more likely to move to Anthropic than the other way around. In an official statement, Google thanked Jumper for his contributions to DeepMind's work advancing science and AI.
Impact On The AI Race
The researcher departures coincide with a period in which Gemini models have for some time failed to top comparative benchmark rankings, trailing offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI, while the launch of Gemini 3.5 Pro came several months later than originally announced.
For Anthropic, landing a Nobel laureate is above all a reputational signal, bolstering the company's standing in AI for scientific research alongside its existing work on model interpretability and AI safety. For Google, it is another blow to its ability to retain key researchers at a moment when competition for AI talent is moving at a record pace.
