AlphaFold Co-Creator John Jumper Leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic

Senior research scientist John Jumper said on Friday that he would leave Google DeepMind to join AI startup Anthropic, marking another high-profile departure from the technology giant's artificial intelligence division, Jaspreet Singh reported for Reuters.

Jumper has jumped ship. (Photo: John Sears, Wikimedia Commons)

Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize with Google's Demis Hassabis, is best known as the co-creator of AlphaFold, a groundbreaking AI system that has predicted more than 200 million protein structures, significantly accelerating biological and medical research.

"After nearly nine years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic," Jumper said in a post on X.

Technology companies including Meta and Alphabet, along with AI startups such as Anthropic and OpenAI, are engaged in an intense competition for top researchers as they race to develop next-generation AI systems.

Jumper's departure comes just days after Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini AI models, announced he would leave the company to join OpenAI.

"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," Hassabis wrote in response to Jumper's post.

Jumper is joining Anthropic at a time when the company is facing significant legal and regulatory scrutiny from the US government.