Four prominent AI researchers have departed Google for rivals OpenAI and Anthropic in June 2026, raising concerns about talent retention at one of the industry’s largest AI operations.
Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, who played key roles in developing Google’s Gemini model, are leaving for Anthropic, according to Bloomberg. Their departures follow two high-profile exits announced just days earlier.
Noam Shazeer, who joined Google in 2000 and most recently returned to work on Gemini, announced he is leaving for OpenAI. Google had effectively acquihired his chatbot startup Character.AI for $2.7 billion, in part to bring him back to the company. Shortly after Shazeer’s announcement, Google DeepMind Director John Jumper said he is also leaving for Anthropic. Jumper, alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold, a system that predicts 3D protein structures from amino acid sequences.
TechCrunch reported that Google was contacted for comment.
The departures could continue, as both OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing to go public — a timeline that may allow them to recruit top AI talent with promises of equity. For Google, losing researchers with direct involvement in flagship products like Gemini and foundational work like AlphaFold represents a significant concentration of outgoing expertise in a short period.
Source: TechCrunch