TL;DR
John Jumper, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, is leaving Google DeepMind after nine years to join Anthropic.
John Jumper, the vice president of Google DeepMind who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to create AlphaFold, leaves the company after almost nine years to join Anthropic. Jumper announced the move on X on Thursday, saying he would take some time to recharge before starting Claude’s maker. Both Google DeepMind and Anthropic confirmed the departure.
“Demis Hassabis took a big risk by allowing me to lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD.” wrote Jumper. Hassabis, who shared the Nobel Prize with Jumper, responded publicly: “What we accomplished with AlphaFold changed the world and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine, lighting the way so AI can benefit humanity.“
The departure lands a day later. Gemini co-head Noam Shazeer announced he was leaving Google for OpenAImaking this the second historic loss of talent for Google’s AI operation in 48 hours. Shazeer co-authored the 2017 “Attention is all you need“Paper that underpins virtually all major modern language models. Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to get it back from Character.AI less than two years ago.
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Jumper shared half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Hassabis for developing AlphaFold2, an artificial intelligence system that can predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. The other half went to Professor David Baker at the University of Washington for computational protein design. AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million scientists in 190 countries since its launch, accelerating research into malaria vaccines, cancer treatments and drug-resistant bacteria.
Before joining DeepMind, Jumper earned a Marshall Scholarship to study at Cambridge and completed a PhD in theoretical chemistry at the University of Chicago. He was born in 1985, making him the youngest Nobel laureate in chemistry in more than 70 years when he received the prize.
Neither Anthropic nor Jumper have revealed what role he will take on at the company. But the hire aligns with Anthropic’s growing push into life sciences and computational biology. In April, Anthropic paid $400 million in stock for Coefficient Bioa stealth biotech startup with fewer than 10 employees, most of them former Genentech computational biology researchers.
That acquisition brought expertise in the field of protein design and biomolecule modeling to Anthropic’s health and life sciences division, led by Eric Kauderer-Abrams, who has said he wants to “a significant percentage of all biological science work in the world is based on Claude.“Adding a Nobel laureate whose work fundamentally changed the way the field understands protein structure would give that ambition considerable scientific credibility.
Timing also matters for Google. Bloomberg has reported that DeepMind employees and executives have expressed concerns in recent months that the company lacks a clear solution for companies seeking AI coding tools, an area where Anthropic and OpenAI have gained significant momentum. Anthropic’s Claude Code has driven much of the company’s recent revenue growth, and DeepMind engineers have left for Anthropic at a nearly 11-to-1 ratio, according to industry analysis.
Google DeepMind remains a formidable research operation. It spun off Isomorphic Labs to pursue AI-designed drug candidates that are now entering clinical trials, and its Gemini models power products used by more than a million people at the Pentagon alone. A spokesperson said the company was “Grateful for his contributions to DeepMind’s work in advancing science and AI.“
But the back-to-back departures of Jumper and Shazeer raise a question that Google’s retention spending has failed to answer. Shazeer left despite a deal worth billions. Jumper walks away with a Nobel Prize named after DeepMind.
If neither prestige nor money can retain the people who built the company’s most famous achievements, the problem may not be compensation.
For Anthropic, hiring is a statement about where the company is headed. Jumper’s expertise lies at the intersection of AI and fundamental science, a domain in which Anthropic has been investing aggressively but has not yet proven it can lead. Whether the creator of AlphaFold can replicate that kind of breakthrough outside the lab that made it possible is something neither his Nobel Prize nor the valuation of his new employer can guarantee.
