John Jumper, the Google DeepMind vice president who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, announced on Friday that he is leaving the company after nearly nine years to join Anthropic. In a post on X, Jumper credited DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis with letting him lead the AlphaFold team just six months after he finished his PhD, and said the wider DeepMind organization taught him a great deal about how to do great science. AlphaFold, the model he led, predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino-acid sequences and reshaped computational structural biology; Jumper and Hassabis shared the chemistry Nobel for it in 2024.
The move is notable both for who is moving and for where he is going. Anthropic has not been publicly associated with the kind of scientific structure-prediction work that made Jumper's name, and bringing on a Nobel laureate whose expertise sits at the intersection of machine learning and biology signals an ambition to build serious capability in AI for science. It also lands during a week of conspicuous churn at DeepMind: Character AI co-founder Noam Shazeer, one of the original transformer authors, separately announced that he is leaving DeepMind as well, in his case to join OpenAI. Bloomberg reported that Jumper had been a key member of Google's team developing coding tools, an area where the company has struggled to convert research into products that businesses will buy.
For Anthropic, the hire arrives at an awkward but arguably opportune moment. The same week, the company pulled its two newest models from availability after an export-control order, and the attention around that episode coincides with a high-profile scientific recruit joining its ranks. For DeepMind, losing both Jumper and Shazeer inside a single week sharpens questions about talent retention as compensation and equity packages at the frontier labs continue to escalate. The reporting frames the departures as part of a broader competition for the small number of researchers capable of leading frontier programs, with Anthropic and OpenAI both drawing senior figures out of Google's AI organization. Jumper, for his part, said DeepMind is a special place and that he would still be excited to hear about what it discovers next.
- The Information frames Jumper's exit within a broader DeepMind talent drain, leading with his VP title and the 2024 Nobel.
- TechCrunch adds that transformer co-author Noam Shazeer also left DeepMind this week, in his case for OpenAI, and cites Bloomberg that Jumper had worked on Google's coding tools.