Senior Research Scientist John Jumper said on Friday that he will part ways with Google DeepMind to join Anthropic. Jumper is a Nobel-winning scientist alongside Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and is also know as the co-creator of AlphaFold, which is a breakthrough AI that has predicted more than 200 million protein structures, slashing down years off biological and medical research. Jumper wrote in an X post, ‘After nearly nine years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic.’
It is no secret that all the AI giants like Google, Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI are always in a talent war, and we see a lot of moving from here to there. DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria said, ‘There is so much demand for limited AI research talent that the frontier AI research labs are willing to do whatever it takes to add them. This puts OpenAI and Anthropic at an advantage over large companies like Google because they can promise less bureaucracy and a more focused effort on pursuing Superintelligence.’
Junper’s move came just a few days after the vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of Gemini AI models, Noam Shazeer, said he would leave the company to join Sam Altman’s OpenAI.
Coming back to Jumper, Google DeepMind CEO Denis Hassabis replied to his post and said, ‘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.’ According to his LinkedIn page, John Jumper serves as the Vice President, Engineering Fellow, at Google DeepMind. Another thing to note here is that Jumper is moving to Anthropic at a time when the organization is having a battle against the US government regarding its AI models. Anthropic is also hosting a science event on June 30, 2026.
