John Jumper, the Google DeepMind vice president who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating AlphaFold, is leaving the company after nearly nine years to join Anthropic. Jumper announced the move on X on Thursday, saying he would take some time to recharge before starting at the Claude maker. Both Google DeepMind and Anthropic confirmed the departure.

“Demis Hassabis took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD,” Jumper wrote. Hassabis, who shared the Nobel Prize with Jumper, responded publicly: “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.”

The departure lands one day after Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer announced he was leaving Google for OpenAI, making this the second landmark talent loss for Google’s AI operation in 48 hours. Shazeer co-authored the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper that underpins virtually every modern large language model. Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to bring him back from Character.AI less than two years ago.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Jumper shared half the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Hassabis for developing AlphaFold2, an AI system that can predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. The other half went to University of Washington professor David Baker for computational protein design. AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million scientists across 190 countries since its release, accelerating research on 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 chemistry Nobel laureate in more than 70 years when he received the prize.

Neither Anthropic nor Jumper has disclosed what role he will take at the company. But the hire aligns with Anthropic’s expanding push into life sciences and computational biology. In April, Anthropic paid $400 million in stock for Coefficient Bio, a stealth biotech startup with fewer than 10 employees, most of them former Genentech computational biology researchers.

That acquisition brought domain expertise in protein design and biomolecule modelling into Anthropic’s healthcare and life sciences division, led by Eric Kauderer-Abrams, who has said he wants “a meaningful percentage of all of the life science work in the world to run on Claude.” Adding a Nobel laureate whose work fundamentally changed how the field understands protein structure would give that ambition considerable scientific credibility.

The timing also matters for Google. Bloomberg has reported that employees and executives at DeepMind have raised concerns in recent months that the company lacks a clear solution for businesses seeking AI coding tools, an area where Anthropic and OpenAI have built significant momentum. Anthropic’s Claude Code has driven much of the company’s recent revenue growth, and engineers at DeepMind have been leaving for Anthropic at a ratio of nearly 11 to 1, according to industry analyses.

Google DeepMind remains a formidable research operation. It spun off Isomorphic Labs to pursue AI-designed drug candidates now entering clinical trials, and its Gemini models power products used by more than a million people across 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 not been able to answer. Shazeer left despite a deal reportedly worth billions. Jumper leaves with a Nobel Prize bearing DeepMind’s name.

If neither prestige nor money can hold the people who built the company’s most celebrated achievements, the problem may not be compensation.

For Anthropic, the hire is a statement about where the company is heading. Jumper’s expertise sits at the intersection of AI and fundamental science, a domain Anthropic has been investing in aggressively but has not yet proven it can lead. Whether the AlphaFold creator can replicate that kind of breakthrough outside the lab that made it possible is something neither his Nobel Prize nor his new employer’s valuation can guarantee.