Google DeepMind has lost a second prominent researcher this week.
A day after Noam Shazeer, the co-lead of Gemini and co-author of the foundational “Attention Is All You Need” paper, announced he was leaving for OpenAI, John Jumper — the Nobel Prize-winning scientist behind AlphaFold — confirmed he will be joining Anthropic after nearly nine years at the company.
Jumper announced the move on X, thanking DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for giving him the chance to lead AlphaFold just six months after completing his PhD. “GDM is a special place,” he wrote, “and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.” He added that he plans to take some time to recharge before starting at Anthropic.
The AlphaFold Years
Jumper’s background is in computational chemistry. He studied at Vanderbilt University before earning a Marshall Scholarship to Cambridge, then completed his PhD in theoretical chemistry at the University of Chicago in 2017, where he applied machine learning to the physics of protein folding. He joined DeepMind the same year, initially as a research scientist, and eventually rose to VP and Engineering Fellow.
The project he is best known for, AlphaFold, tackled one of biology’s longest-standing unsolved problems: predicting the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. Before AlphaFold, this was a slow, expensive, and largely manual process. AlphaFold2, released in 2021, did it with accuracy that stunned the scientific community and remains one of the most-cited papers published that decade. The system has since been used by more than two million researchers across 190 countries, with applications ranging from malaria vaccine development to cancer drug discovery.
In 2024, Jumper and Hassabis shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work, with the other half going to University of Washington professor David Baker for computational protein design. The Nobel Committee credited them with cracking “the code for proteins’ amazing structures” and solving a fifty-year-old problem using AI. Before the Nobel, Jumper had already received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, and the Canada Gairdner International Award, among others.
A Notable Week for Google
The timing makes this departure particularly pointed. Shazeer’s exit to OpenAI was already a significant story — Google reportedly spent $2.7 billion in 2024 to bring him back from Character.AI, and losing him to a direct competitor less than two years later carries obvious narrative weight. Jumper’s departure to Anthropic, announced within 48 hours, compounds that.
Anthropic has been on a sustained hiring run, pulling in researchers and senior figures from across the industry. A 2025 SignalFire report found that engineers at DeepMind were nearly eleven times more likely to leave for Anthropic than the reverse. Jumper adds a different kind of weight to that list — a Nobel laureate whose most famous work sits at the intersection of AI and scientific discovery, precisely the territory Anthropic has been signaling greater ambitions in.
Neither Jumper nor Anthropic has disclosed what his role will be. But given that he spent nine years leading one of the most scientifically consequential AI projects ever built, the expectation is that he will play a significant part in Anthropic’s research direction. Hassabis responded publicly to the announcement: “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.”
For Anthropic, landing someone with Jumper’s scientific credibility — and his specific expertise in applying AI to hard biological problems — is a meaningful addition at a time when the frontier labs are competing not just on benchmarks, but on the scope of what they claim AI can eventually do.