Google just had a very bad week. Four high-profile AI researchers exited for rival labs in rapid succession, triggering Alphabet’s steepest single-day stock decline in over a year and raising uncomfortable questions about whether the company that essentially invented modern AI is losing its grip on the field.
The departures read like a roster of irreplaceable talent. Noam Shazeer, co-lead of Google’s Gemini model and vice president of engineering, left for OpenAI around June 18. The next day, John Jumper, a Nobel laureate in Chemistry recognized in 2024 for his work on AlphaFold, walked out the door to join Anthropic after nine years at DeepMind.
Then came the second wave. On June 24, reports surfaced that Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both senior researchers who contributed to Gemini, are also set to transition to Anthropic. Four departures in six days is not a coincidence. It’s a pattern.
The acqui-hire that didn’t stick
The Shazeer exit stings particularly hard because Google paid roughly $2.7B in an acqui-hire to bring him back into the fold. He was co-leading the development of Gemini, the model Google is betting its AI future on. Losing him to the company that popularized ChatGPT is the kind of headline that makes board members lose sleep.
