Nobel laureate John Jumper leaves DeepMind for Anthropic

John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, is leaving Google DeepMind for Anthropic after nearly nine years. He announced the move on X on Friday and did not say what he will work on. In his note he thanked DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis, who he said "took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD," and called the lab a special place that taught him how to do great science.

The departure fits a wider pattern. TechCrunch reports that Noam Shazeer, a co-founder of Character AI, is also leaving this week, in his case for OpenAI. Bloomberg has reported that Jumper played a large part in Google's internal coding tools, which the company has struggled to turn into products.

Anthropic built its reputation on language models and safety rather than scientific computing, so hiring the researcher most associated with AI for biology is a clear signal about where it wants to go.

Why it matters

If you follow AI for science, watch what Anthropic ships next in biology or chemistry. A single hire rarely changes a roadmap on its own, but Jumper is the rare researcher whose presence tells you a lab is serious about a field it has mostly stayed out of.