DeepMind departures: 4 AI stars leave Google in a week

Shazeer, a co-author of Attention Is All You Need, joined OpenAI (announced 18 June). Jumper — a DeepMind director and 2024 Nobel chemistry laureate for AlphaFold — went to Anthropic (20 June). Bloomberg then reported Adler (AI coding) and Pritzel (pretraining, AlphaFold) were also Anthropic-bound. The pull: pre-IPO equity at Anthropic's recent $65B raise and ~$965B valuation, the world's most valuable private AI company.

It wasn't only pay. Reporting cites internal DeepMind tensions — compute for one of Shazeer's projects was reassigned to a London team before he left — plus strategic fit with Anthropic's push into coding, health and science. Jumper's start may slip to 2027 due to non-competes. Alphabet shares fell about 5-6% on 22 June on AI-spend and retention worries.

Google is pushing back on the narrative. DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis said in Cannes that talent moves between all leading labs, that Google wins its fair share, and that it retains the biggest, broadest research bench of any lab. Watch whether the exits continue and how they affect Gemini's roadmap.

The wider pattern is what matters. Frontier AI is bottlenecked on a few hundred people who can actually build state-of-the-art models, so each marquee move reshapes the race more than a product launch would. With Anthropic and OpenAI both nearing IPOs and dangling pre-listing equity, Google faces a structural recruiting disadvantage its public stock can't easily fix. Watch whether Google answers with retention packages, restricted-stock refreshes or an internal reorganisation to keep its remaining stars — and whether the poaching war intensifies through the rest of 2026.