On a Friday morning in June 2026, John Jumper — a Nobel Prize-winning chemist and one of the most recognisable names in applied artificial intelligence — announced that he was leaving Google DeepMind after nearly nine years to join Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI safety company. The move, which he confirmed in a post on X, surprised many in the research community, not least because Jumper had spent the most consequential years of his career at DeepMind, where he led the team that built AlphaFold. AlphaFold is the AI model that changed biology. By predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their genetic sequences alone, it solved a problem that had defeated biochemists for more than half a century.

For that work, Jumper and DeepMind's chief executive Demis Hassabis were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 — a rare moment when a piece of software was credited with reshaping an entire scientific discipline. In his farewell message, Jumper acknowledged that Hassabis had taken a genuine risk by appointing him to lead the AlphaFold team only six months after he had completed his doctorate. "GDM is a special place," he wrote, "and I'll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next." Jumper's departure comes alongside that of Noam Shazeer, a co-founder of Character AI who had also been working at DeepMind and announced this week that he would be joining OpenAI.

The two exits, arriving within days of each other, have prompted questions about talent retention at one of the world's most celebrated AI laboratories. Bloomberg reported separately that Jumper had been working on coding tools at Google — a product line the company has found difficult to sell to enterprise clients.