Google loses more top AI researchers to Anthropic and OpenAI

Google is experiencing a wave of departures among its artificial intelligence researchers, who are leaving the company for competitors. According to a report by Bloomberg, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are leaving Google to join Anthropic. Bloomberg reported that Adler and Pritzel played key roles in the development of Gemini, which is Google’s AI model. Their departures coincide with another exit from Google’s AI division: John Jumper, a director at Google DeepMind, is also leaving the company for Anthropic. In 2024, Jumper and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold. AlphaFold is an AI system for protein structure prediction that can predict 3D protein structures from amino acid sequences. These departures represent a concerning trend for Google as it loses researchers who built Gemini and AlphaFold.

These exits follow the departure of researcher Noam Shazeer, who announced last week that he was leaving Google for OpenAI. Shazeer originally started at Google in the year 2000. He later left Google to build Character.AI, which is a chatbot startup where he spent three years. Google subsequently acquired Character.AI for $2.7 billion in an “acqui-hire”—an acquisition executed primarily for talent—which was intended in part to bring Shazeer back to Google to work on Gemini. The $2.7 billion acquisition highlights Google’s efforts to secure talent, yet researchers continue to depart for competitors. Despite this $2.7 billion acquisition to retain him, Shazeer has now chosen to join OpenAI.

This trend of researchers leaving Google could continue. As OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to go public, they are leveraging the promise of equity to recruit researchers. According to the source, this transition period represents a favorable time for these companies to recruit researchers with the promise of equity, providing them with a way to draw talent away from Google.

Why it matters

Google faces a concerning trend of departures as competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic leverage the promise of equity and upcoming public offerings to recruit researchers.