Nobel laureate John Jumper leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic

John Jumper, the co-creator of AlphaFold and co-winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, announced on Friday that he is leaving Google DeepMind after nearly nine years to join Anthropic.

"After nearly 9 years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic (after taking some time to recharge)," Jumper wrote in a post on X. He credited DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for giving him the chance to lead the AlphaFold team "just six months after finishing my PhD," adding that the lab "taught me so much about how to do great science."digg+1

A Gracious Departure

Hassabis responded publicly, thanking Jumper for "an extraordinary partnership and wonderful collaboration over the past 9 years" and saying that what they achieved with AlphaFold "changed the world."digg

Jumper joined DeepMind in 2017 after completing his PhD at the University of Chicago. He quickly became the driving force behind AlphaFold, the AI system that solved the decades-old problem of predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences. That work earned him and Hassabis one half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with David Baker of the University of Washington. At 39, Jumper was the youngest Chemistry Nobel laureate in over seven decades.forbes+3

A Talent Drain at Google

The departure lands just days after another high-profile exit from Google: Noam Shazeer, vice president of engineering and co-lead of the Gemini AI project, announced on Wednesday that he is leaving for OpenAI. Shazeer, a co-author of the foundational "Attention Is All You Need" Transformer paper, had only returned to Google in 2024 as part of a $2.7 billion deal to acquire his startup Character.AI.cnbc+2

The back-to-back losses have intensified questions about Google's ability to retain elite AI talent. "What is going on at Google DeepMind?" one AI researcher wrote on X in response to the news. Others noted that frontier AI labs offer something Google struggles to match: "the feeling that one person can still directly change the trajectory of the company."digg

What Comes Next

Jumper did not disclose his role at Anthropic, his start date, or the specific projects he plans to work on. He indicated he will take time off before beginning at the company. Anthropic, which has filed confidentially to go public as soon as this fall, has been navigating a turbulent stretch after the U.S. Commerce Department recently ordered it to take its two most powerful models offline over national security concerns.fortune+2

The hire nonetheless marks a striking addition for the safety-focused AI lab — and a pointed loss for the organization where AlphaFold was built.