Nobel winner John Jumper leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic

In short: Nobel Prize winning scientist John Jumper said he is leaving Google DeepMind to join Anthropic.

What happened

John Jumper announced on X that he is moving to Anthropic after nearly nine years at Google DeepMind. He thanked DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for trusting him to lead the AlphaFold team soon after he finished his PhD.

Jumper and Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024 for AlphaFold. AlphaFold is an AI model, meaning a computer program trained from lots of examples, that predicts the 3D shape of proteins from genetic information. You can think of it like turning a long string of letters into a folded piece of origami, then guessing the final shape.

TechCrunch also noted that other high profile people have been leaving DeepMind. Bloomberg reported that Jumper was involved in Google’s efforts to build AI tools for writing code, and that Google has had a hard time selling some of those tools to business customers. This week, Noam Shazeer, a co founder of Character AI, also said he is leaving DeepMind, and he is joining OpenAI.

Why it matters

Moves like this can shift where important AI research happens and which companies attract top talent. For regular people, that can affect what kinds of AI products show up first, who sets the rules inside those products, and how fast new tools move from labs into everyday services.

Source: TechCrunch AI