Top Google AI researchers flee to Anthropic and OpenAI

A new wave of high-profile defections is shaking Google’s AI division. Bloomberg reports that Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both instrumental in developing Google’s Gemini model, have resigned to join Anthropic. These departures add to a growing list of top researchers leaving the tech giant for rivals. Last week, Noam Shazeer — a Google employee since 2000 who briefly left to found Character.AI (which Google effectively acqui-hired for $2.7 billion) — announced his move to OpenAI. Just days later, John Jumper, a 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold, said he was leaving for Anthropic alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.

The exodus signals a worrying trend for Google as OpenAI and Anthropic prepare for public offerings. Both companies are aggressively recruiting top talent by offering equity stakes, making it an attractive time for researchers to leave stable roles at Google for potentially lucrative payouts. With Gemini’s development now losing key architects and AlphaFold’s creator departing, Google faces mounting pressure to retain its AI talent or risk falling behind in the race to dominate generative AI and foundational models.