Google faces new AI talent departures to Anthropic

Alphabet AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel plan to leave Google to join rival startup Anthropic. Adler worked on the company's AI programming development, while Pritzel contributed to training AI systems. Both researchers were considered key internal contributors to Google's Gemini AI model.

The planned moves follow other recent senior exits from Google. Nobel laureate John Jumper departed for Anthropic, and researcher Noam Shazeer joined OpenAI. Another researcher, Arthur Conmy, who was a senior research engineer at DeepMind working on Gemini 2.5, also announced on Wednesday that he would join Anthropic to work on AI safety.

Alphabet shares closed slightly lower after falling as much as 1.2% during trading on Wednesday. In addition to equity packages offered by pre-IPO startups, internal computing resources contributed to friction. Before Shazeer departed for OpenAI, computing power dedicated to his project was reassigned to a London-based Google DeepMind team to streamline pre-training work.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, defended the firm's talent standing earlier in the week at an event in Cannes. He stated that talent moves frequently between top labs and said Google captures a strong share of top talent with the industry's largest and most diverse research platform, while acknowledging that the market is fiercely competitive.