John Jumper Leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic, Boosting AI Talent War

Nobel laureate John Jumper, co‑creator of the AlphaFold system that has predicted over 200 million protein structures, announced on X that he is leaving Google DeepMind after nearly nine years to join AI startup Anthropic. In his post he thanked DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for giving him the chance to lead AlphaFold shortly after his PhD and described DeepMind as a “special place”. Jumper said he will take a short break before starting his new role at Anthropic, though his exact position was not disclosed.

AlphaFold is widely credited with transforming biology and drug discovery by solving the decades‑old protein‑folding problem. Jumper’s departure follows the recent exit of Noam Shazeer, a co‑inventor of the Transformer architecture, who left for OpenAI, underscoring an intensifying talent war among major AI labs. Anthropic’s hiring of Jumper signals its ambition to expand beyond chatbot models into scientific AI, while Google DeepMind loses a high‑profile researcher whose work has had global scientific impact.