It’s only been a few days since Nobel laureate John Jumper left Google DeepMind for Anthropic. Now Google is bleeding more talent — not by choice. According to a Bloomberg report from June 24, two more high-profile AI researchers are about to jump to Anthropic.
Three in six days
The names: Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel. Both are seen internally as key contributors to Google’s Gemini model. Adler worked on the coding effort, Pritzel on training the models — exactly the areas where the AI race is being decided right now. Together with Jumper, that’s three prominent Gemini departures inside six days.
And it’s not only Anthropic cashing in. Star researcher Noam Shazeer — one of the minds behind the original Transformer architecture — is reportedly heading to OpenAI. That leaves Google in a position no tech company wants to be in: the very people who built its flagship model are being poached, one after another, by the challengers.
Why now?
The decisive lever isn’t necessarily salary — Google pays well already. It’s timing. Anthropic and OpenAI are both on the cusp of going public. Anthropic has already filed confidentially for an IPO after a funding round that valued it at $965 billion. Joining now, before the shares trade publicly, means a shot at a rare payday — pre-IPO equity that can be worth a multiple of its value once the company lists.
For well-paid Big Tech employees, that’s an argument a higher salary struggles to beat. Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t just selling interesting work — they’re selling a financial window that’s about to close.
My take
Talent movement in AI isn’t new — but the pattern is getting sharper. A year ago it was about individual stars and signing bonuses. Today it’s about whole layers of key people and the pull of an imminent IPO. Google has the money and the research depth to fight back, no question. But when the architects of your flagship walk to the competition, that’s more than an HR problem — it’s a signal of where the energy in the field actually sits right now.
The side effect I find interesting: Anthropic isn’t just attracting coding and training experts, but — with Jumper — a Nobel laureate from biology. That fits a company increasingly thinking of AI as a tool for science, not just a chatbot.
Sources: Bloomberg: Google Poised to Lose Two More High-Profile AI Staffers to Anthropic