John Jumper Leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic

Senior research scientist John Jumper announced on Friday that he will leave Google DeepMind to join AI startup Anthropic. Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry alongside Google's Demis Hassabis for work on artificial intelligence. He is best known as the co-creator of AlphaFold, an AI system that has predicted more than 200 million protein structures.

"After nearly nine years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic," Jumper said in a post on X. He described Google DeepMind as a "special place" and said he remained interested in its future discoveries. "We are grateful for John's significant contributions to Google DeepMind's work in advancing science and AI.

We wish him well in his next chapter," a Google DeepMind spokesperson told Reuters.

Technology giants including Meta and Alphabet, along with AI startups such as Anthropic and OpenAI, are competing for elite researchers. Jumper's departure comes days after Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini AI models, said he would leave to join OpenAI.

Anthropic is hosting a science event on June 30. The startup did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on Jumper's new role. "What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world, and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine, lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity," Hassabis said in a reply to Jumper's post.