Four senior A.I. researchers have walked out of Google in six days, and the market has noticed. Bloomberg reported on June 24 that Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both contributors to the Gemini model, are preparing to leave for Anthropic, citing people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. Adler had been working on Google’s A.I. coding effort; Pritzel was involved in pre-training. Google and Anthropic declined to comment.

The exits land at the worst possible moment for Alphabet’s narrative. On June 18, Noam Shazeer, co-lead of the Gemini models and vice president of engineering, announced on X that he was rejoining OpenAI, less than two years after Google brought him back through a $2.7 billion deal with Character.AI in August 2024. Shazeer is the co-author of the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” the document that introduced the transformer and effectively created the industry now hiring him away. Days later, John Jumper, a 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry for AlphaFold and a nine-year DeepMind veteran, announced he was leaving for Anthropic.

The price action has been brutal. The Next Web attributed a roughly 6 percent single-session drop in Alphabet’s share price to Jumper’s exit, more than $245 billion in market value erased. Search Engine Journal tied Alphabet’s 5 to 6 percent slide on June 22 to the same anxiety: A.I. capex without retention. Shares fell as much as 1.2 percent intraday on Wednesday before closing slightly down.

There’s also a tell inside the building. Bloomberg reported that shortly before Shazeer’s announcement, computing power dedicated to one of his projects was reassigned to a London-based DeepMind team, an action Google described as streamlining pre-training work. To Shazeer, evidently, it read differently.

The structural picture is the one to watch. Anthropic, per Search Engine Journal, has been recruiting aggressively out of DeepMind in coding, healthcare and scientific applications, the same areas where DeepMind staff have reportedly told Bloomberg that Google lacks a clear enterprise product. OpenAI, meanwhile, has filed confidentially for an I.P.O. The transformer’s co-author is going to the company about to test public markets, and the Nobel laureate is going to its best-funded rival. Google still owns the paper. It no longer owns the people.

Sources