Anthropic is hiring three core Google DeepMind researchers within just six days, according to Bloomberg and CNBC reporting in June 2026. John Jumper, the 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry, and Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, who helped build Gemini, are all heading to Anthropic. Over the same stretch, Transformer paper co-author Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI, making the drain of frontier AI talent from Google to its rivals unmistakable. This article lays out who went where, and what it means, strictly on the basis of primary reporting.

What Happened

Bloomberg reported on June 24, 2026, that Google is poised to lose two more Gemini staffers to Anthropic. The June 19 news of Nobel chemistry laureate John Jumper's move to Anthropic was followed on June 24 by the additions of Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel. Counting Shazeer's move to OpenAI, four senior Google researchers are leaving the company within six days.

TechCrunch framed the trend as Google talent continuing to leave for rivals. Core members of the team that built Gemini are departing one after another.

Who Left

John Jumper is a Google DeepMind director who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Demis Hassabis for AlphaFold, the protein-structure-prediction model. A scientist who left a deep mark by predicting three-dimensional protein structures from amino acid sequences is now moving to Anthropic.

Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are researchers who played key roles in developing the Gemini model. Adler worked on Google's AI coding efforts and Pritzel handled pretraining, the early stage in which a model learns from large volumes of data, and both also contributed to AlphaFold research alongside Jumper.

Why Anthropic and OpenAI

The IPO preparations of OpenAI and Anthropic are cited as the backdrop for these moves. TechCrunch analyzed that the two companies are drawing talent with equity incentives ahead of going public. Recalling that Google spent roughly $2.7 billion in 2024 to bring Shazeer back from Character.AI, one can gauge how high the cost of securing talent has become.

The essence of model competition is once again confirmed to be talent competition. Where the people who built Gemini and AlphaFold go will help decide the direction of the next generation of models.

What to Watch

Bloomberg, CNBC, and TechCrunch are the primary outlets behind this reporting, yet the specific terms and start dates of the hires remain officially unconfirmed by the companies. How each researcher's role settles within a new organization will only become clear over time.

For Google, the consecutive departures from the core Gemini team could be a burden. Still, it is too early to conclude that one or two moves translate into a technology gap, since organizational depth and follow-on hiring will determine the real impact.

Summary

Anthropic hired three core Google DeepMind researchers, including Nobel laureate John Jumper, within six days, while Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI over the same period. As frontier labs heading toward IPOs pull in talent with equity incentives, the fact that model competition is talent competition has become clear once more. ASAP has organized this strictly on the basis of primary reporting, without speculating about terms that remain unconfirmed.

Sources: Bloomberg · CNBC · TechCrunch