Anthropic has recruited two more senior researchers from Google DeepMind, extending what is becoming one of the most concentrated talent exoduses in recent AI research history.
Jonas Adler, who led the lab’s AI coding efforts, and Alexander Pritzel, a specialist in pretraining — the foundational stage where large language models learn from massive datasets — are both expected to join Anthropic, according to people familiar with the plans, as reported by TechCrunch on June 24. Both researchers also contributed to AlphaFold, Google DeepMind’s breakthrough protein-structure prediction system.
Four Departures in Six Days
Their announcements followed two other high-profile exits earlier in the same week. Noam Shazeer, a co-author of the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper that introduced the transformer architecture underpinning virtually all modern AI models, announced he was joining OpenAI. John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold, said he would move to Anthropic.
Taken together, four named senior researchers left Google DeepMind within six days — a concentration of departures that analysts described as unusual even against the backdrop of routine researcher mobility in AI.
Competitive Stakes
The exits carry particular weight given their research focus. Adler’s AI coding work touches one of the most competitive fronts in the industry: the market for developer tools and agentic programming assistants, where Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s products have been gaining ground at Google’s expense.
Alphabet’s stock fell sharply in the days surrounding the announcements. Analysts estimated the company’s market capitalization declined by roughly $270 billion, a figure that reflects broader investor concern about Gemini’s competitive position.
Anthropic has been hiring aggressively from Google DeepMind as it expands beyond general-purpose AI models into areas including coding, healthcare, and scientific research. Resource tensions at Google — including the reassignment of compute from at least one senior researcher’s project — were cited as a contributing factor in the departures.