Google is contending with a significant wave of departures from its artificial intelligence division, as several senior researchers from Google DeepMind have left or are preparing to leave for rival labs OpenAI and Anthropic. The exodus, which has unfolded over roughly a week in late June 2026, has rattled investors and renewed questions about Google's ability to retain top-tier AI talent in an increasingly competitive market.

The departures began when Noam Shazeer, vice president of engineering and co-lead of Google's Gemini AI models, announced on June 18 that he was leaving for OpenAI. Shazeer co-authored the landmark 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer architecture that underpins most modern large language models, including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini itself. His departure is notable given that Google had paid a reported $2.7 billion in 2024 to bring him back into the fold through an acquisition of his startup, Character.AI. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman publicly welcomed the move, describing Shazeer as someone he had "most wanted to work with."

Just a day later, John Jumper, who led Google DeepMind's AlphaFold project and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on protein structure prediction, announced he was also leaving after nearly nine years at the company. Jumper is heading to Anthropic, a move that aligns with the AI safety-focused company's expanding interest in applying artificial intelligence to scientific research. Both Google DeepMind and Anthropic confirmed his departure.

The talent drain has since widened. According to Bloomberg, two additional DeepMind researchers, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, are expected to join Anthropic as well. Adler had worked on Google's AI coding initiatives, while Pritzel was involved in pretraining, the foundational stage in which AI models learn from large datasets. Both researchers had also contributed to AlphaFold alongside Jumper. Google has not confirmed these additional departures, and the individuals involved did not respond to requests for comment.

Alphabet's stock came under pressure following the news, falling as much as several percentage points during trading sessions tied to the reports, with some estimates putting the decline in market value in the tens of billions of dollars. Analysts have linked investor concern to broader questions about Google's competitive position in AI, even as the company continues to report strong financial results. A spokesperson for Google said the company remains confident in its ability to attract and retain talent, pointing to comments from DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis that "there's a lot of talent movement between all the leading labs" and that Google still has "the biggest and broadest research bench" among major AI developers.

The departures come at a pivotal moment for the AI industry, with both OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly moving closer to potential public listings. Anthropic recently raised funding at a valuation near $965 billion, according to reports, overtaking OpenAI to become the most valuable private AI company. Joining a company ahead of an initial public offering can offer researchers substantial equity upside that is harder to match at an established public company like Alphabet. Reports have also pointed to internal friction at Google over computing resource allocation, with Bloomberg noting that computing capacity for one of Shazeer's projects was reportedly reassigned shortly before his departure was announced.

Beyond compensation, some reporting suggests the moves reflect broader concerns about Google's competitive footing in areas such as AI-assisted coding tools, where Anthropic and OpenAI have gained ground among developers. Sundar Pichai, Alphabet's chief executive, acknowledged in May that Google was "a bit behind" on agentic coding products. While Google continues to invest heavily in its Gemini models and AI infrastructure, with total AI spending projected to reach $180 billion to $190 billion in 2026, the loss of senior researchers at this scale underscores how fierce the competition for elite AI talent has become across the industry.

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