Nobel Laureate John Jumper Leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic

A Nobel Laureate on the Move

John Jumper, the co-creator of AlphaFold and joint 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 chief executive Demis Hassabis for handing 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."

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."

From a Fresh PhD to a Nobel Prize

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 cracked the decades-old problem of predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. That breakthrough 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 became the youngest Chemistry Nobel laureate in over seven decades.

A Talent Drain at Google

The departure comes just days after another high-profile exit. 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 seminal "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 start-up Character.AI.

The back-to-back exits have sharpened questions about Google's ability to hold on to elite AI researchers. "What is going on at Google DeepMind?" one researcher wrote on X. Others noted that frontier labs offer something Google struggles to match: the feeling that a single person can still directly change the trajectory of the company.

What Comes Next

Jumper did not disclose his role at Anthropic, his start date, or the specific projects he plans to work on, indicating only that he will take time off first. Anthropic, which has filed confidentially to go public as soon as this autumn, 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. The hire nonetheless marks a striking win for the safety-focused lab, and a pointed loss for the organisation where AlphaFold was built.