Hassabis steps down as Google DeepMind CEO for chair role

What happened: Sundar Pichai announced on 5 August 2026 that Demis Hassabis is no longer CEO of Google DeepMind. Hassabis becomes chair of DeepMind and Alphabet's chief scientist, while keeping his role running Isomorphic Labs.

The details: Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind's CTO and Alphabet's chief AI architect, is now senior vice president of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai. He takes charge of Gemini models, frontier research, and the Gemini app and developer teams, including Gemini 4.

The numbers: Google's announcement cited 950 million monthly Gemini users and 900 million Gemma downloads. Alphabet shares fell more than 5% on the news.

The context: Hassabis will focus on scientific strategy across Alphabet, including frontier AI and work towards artificial general intelligence, stepping back from day-to-day operations. He'll advise DeepMind's leadership from London and work with Pichai on strategic and global AGI matters. Reports say he had already been handing Gemini product decisions to Kavukcuoglu for about a year.

Who's affected: The same day, Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, both Gemini co-leads, announced they were leaving alongside Sanjay Ghemawat and Quoc Le to found their own start-up.

Why it matters: Google is racing OpenAI and Anthropic on frontier models. Consolidating Gemini development under one executive is meant to speed the path from research to shipped products, according to Google.

The rivals: The departure of senior Gemini leadership to build a competing venture adds fresh uncertainty just as Google tries to tighten its execution against rival labs, The Next Web reported.

What's next: Kavukcuoglu now controls the timeline for Gemini 4 and future frontier releases, with Hassabis shifting to a longer-term scientific role above the product cycle.