Nobel-Winning DeepMind Scientist Jumper Joins Anthropic

John Jumper, the Nobel Prize-winning artificial intelligence scientist who led the AlphaFold team at Google DeepMind, is leaving the company for Anthropic.

Jumper announced the move on X on Friday, writing: “After nearly 9 years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic.” He added that DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis “took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD.”

Jumper and Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts protein structures from amino acid sequences. The breakthrough solved a decades-old problem in molecular biology.

Bloomberg News reported that Google confirmed Jumper’s departure. The move could slow Google’s effort to keep pace with Anthropic, OpenAI and others in building the most powerful AI models, the report said, citing unnamed company insiders.

Former Google employees told Bloomberg that the company has struggled to sell AI coding tools to businesses. That product category has become a core focus for both Anthropic and OpenAI, and has helped fuel their recent momentum.

Hassabis responded to Jumper’s departure on X: “Thanks John for an extraordinary partnership and wonderful collaboration over the past 9 years. 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.”

Google has also been adjusting its consumer AI pricing. Earlier this month the company cut the cost of its entry-level AI subscription from $7.99 to $4.99 a month, a sign that competition is shifting from model performance to price. As PYMNTS wrote at the time: “On the consumer side, companies are cutting prices to add subscribers while absorbing the cost of heavy users. On the enterprise side, companies that treated AI spend like flat-rate software are discovering it bills more like utilities.”