John Jumper, who shared a 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for AlphaFold, announced he is leaving Google DeepMind after nearly 9 years to join Anthropic, crediting Demis Hassabis and the DeepMind team for giving him a rare early chance to lead the AlphaFold effor
John Jumper’s departure has the sharp feel of a talent shift inside the AI race: after nearly 9 years at Google DeepMind, the Nobel laureate says he’s moving to rival Anthropic.
Jumper announced the change on Friday. posting on X that he’s “making the leap to Anthropic” after “nearly 9 years” at DeepMind. The timing lands with weight because Jumper isn’t just another researcher moving between labs. He’s part of the AlphaFold story that helped earn global recognition for the company.
In his post. Jumper credited DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for taking a chance on him—letting him lead the AlphaFold team just six months after Jumper finished his PhD. He also wrote that the entire DeepMind team taught him “so much about how to do great science. ” before adding that DeepMind remains a place he’ll still be excited to watch.
“GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next,” Jumper wrote.
The move also carries a business undertow. Bloomberg reports that Jumper was a key member of Google’s team developing coding tools—tools the company has struggled to sell to businesses. That detail helps explain why this kind of high-profile exit matters beyond headlines: when internal bets don’t land commercially. researchers’ paths can start to diverge from leadership priorities.
Jumper’s shift comes amid another senior departure from DeepMind this week. Character AI co-founder Noam Shazeer also announced he’s leaving DeepMind, but his next stop is OpenAI, not Anthropic.
Jumper and Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in 2024 for their work on AlphaFold. an AI model that can predict the 3D structure of proteins based on their genetic sequences. That accomplishment is still central to why DeepMind’s work draws so much attention—and now it’s part of what makes Jumper’s new chapter feel consequential.
For now, DeepMind loses a leader who credits it with shaping his early breakthrough chance. Anthropic gains someone who arrives with a Nobel-backed track record in model-driven protein science—and the kind of relationships inside the lab that, in AI, often determine what gets built next.
John Jumper DeepMind Anthropic Nobel Prize 2024 AlphaFold Demis Hassabis Google protein 3D structure AI research coding tools
So he left DeepMind to go to… another company. Cool. Does this mean AlphaFold is gonna charge money now?
I feel like this is just the AI Olympics. Nobel guy goes here, genius co-founder goes there, meanwhile my job still doesn’t get replaced because nobody can sell it to businesses anyway.
Wait, didn’t DeepMind already build the protein thing? If he’s leaving, does Anthropic get the patents or what? Also “coding tools they struggled to sell” sounds like they didn’t try lol.
This is wild because Nobel Prize chemistry and proteins… like I don’t even understand half of that. But if these people keep bouncing around, maybe the whole thing is basically PR. Next thing you know Hassabis quits too and everyone’s like “new chapter” 🙄