Nobel Laureate John Jumper Departs DeepMind for Anthropic

Jumper announced the transition on X this Friday, expressing gratitude toward DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for granting him leadership of the AlphaFold project shortly after he completed his PhD. While reflecting on his time at the Google subsidiary, Jumper noted that he remains invested in the future scientific breakthroughs coming from his former colleagues.

Beyond his Nobel-winning work on AlphaFold, Jumper had been instrumental in developing coding tools for Google, a segment where the tech giant has faced commercial friction. His exit follows closely behind the departure of Character AI co-founder Noam Shazeer, who recently left the DeepMind ecosystem to join OpenAI. These moves underscore a broader trend of high-profile researchers shifting between the industry's most prominent AI laboratories.