Nobel Prize winner AlphaFold lead John Jumper leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic after 9 years

Anthropic has just poached Google DeepMind's Nobel Prize winner John Jumper. Jumper announced that he will be leaving DeepMind to join Anthropic. He led DeepMind's AlphaFold project that predicted the shape of all 200 million proteins known to science.

In Short

• Jumper said he would take time off before starting at Anthropic
• He thanked Demis Hassabis for trusting him with AlphaFold early
• Hassabis called their nine-year collaboration extraordinary and AlphaFold a world-changing breakthrough

As the battle for securing the most talented workers in the AI race intensifies, Anthropic seems to have bagged a big win against Google as it has managed to poach Nobel Prize winner John Jumper from DeepMind. Jumper had worked closely with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with Hassabis in 2024 for creating AlphaFold 2 that predicted the shape of all 200 million proteins known to science, including that of plants, animals and microorganisms.

On X, John Jumper announced his move to Anthropic after spending nine years at Google DeepMind. He wrote, “After nearly 9 years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic (after taking some time to recharge).”

The Nobel Prize winner thanked Google DeepMind and Demis Hassabis for giving him the chance to lead the AlphaFold project just months after he completed his PhD. John added, “Demis Hassabisemi took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD, and the entire GDM team taught me so much about how to do great science.”

Google DeepMind CEO replied to Jumper’s post, thanking him for what he called an "extraordinary partnership." Hassabis added, "What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world, and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine, lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity.”

Google under pressure in AI race?

John Jumper’s switch to Anthropic is the second big-name loss to a rival for Google in recent days. Earlier this week, Google’s star AI engineer Noam Shazeer left the company for OpenAI. Google had previously paid over $2 billion to bring Noam.

It is believed that Jumper's departure adds to the pressure Google may already be facing in the AI race as it tries to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI in AI products, including coding tools.

As per a report from Bloomberg, former employees say that Google had struggled to sell AI coding tools to businesses, while employees and executives at DeepMind had raised concerns in recent months about the lack of a clear solution for business customers in that area.

Do note that tech companies including Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are increasingly looking to hire top talent as they build advanced AI systems. This is not limited to the US either. China’s Deepseek recently told investors to not poach their engineers.

Jumper led Google's AlphaFold team. The AI system predicts a protein's three-dimensional structure from its amino acid sequence and is seen as a major breakthrough for biological and medical research. The technology now offers more than 200 million protein structure predictions, helping cut months and even years from parts of the research process.

At the time of writing, it is unclear when John Jumper will start working for Anthropic or what role he will take up at the AI startup.

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