via TechCrunch AI
Nobel Laureate John Jumper Leaves DeepMind for Rival Anthropic
John Jumper, who shared a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024, announced on Friday that he is leaving Google DeepMind for Anthropic after “nearly 9 years” at the company.
In a post on X, Jumper wrote that DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis “took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD, and the entire GDM team taught me so much about how to do great science.” He added, “GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.”
Jumper (pictured above right, with Hassabis) was a key member of Google’s team developing coding tools, according to Bloomberg, a business area where the company has struggled to gain enterprise traction. His departure follows that of Character AI co-founder Noam Shazeer, who announced earlier this week he is also leaving DeepMind—but for OpenAI, rather than Anthropic.
Jumper and Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their genetic sequences. The move to Anthropic further intensifies the ongoing AI talent war as 2026 sees major companies vying for top researchers amid rapid commercialization of AI technologies.