John Jumper says he is leaving Google DeepMind to join Anthropic

John Jumper, co-creator of AlphaFold and a 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate, said on June 19 that he is leaving Google DeepMind to join Anthropic after nearly nine years at the lab. The announcement came in a post on his personal X account, in which he thanked DeepMind and credited chief executive Demis Hassabis with letting him lead the AlphaFold team early in his career.

The move would put one of the field's most decorated researchers at a company best known for large language models rather than the computational biology that made his name. Jumper shared AlphaFold, the protein structure prediction system built at DeepMind, which the Nobel Committee credited with letting scientists predict protein shapes at scale.

Anthropic has not commented on the hire and has not specified what role Jumper would take. Google DeepMind has acknowledged the departure, and Hassabis publicly praised Jumper's work after the post. In his own statement, Jumper said he would take some time to recharge before starting at Anthropic, and he did not name a team or start date.

That leaves the central questions of the move unanswered. Anthropic has not said what Jumper would work on, whether his focus would shift toward AI systems and away from protein modeling, or how the hire fits its research agenda. Until the company speaks, the specifics rest on Jumper's own account of his plans.

What is on the record is the departure itself. Jumper joined DeepMind in 2017 and helped turn AlphaFold into a tool now used widely across biology. A senior researcher leaving Google's AI lab for Anthropic marks a notable shift in where high-profile talent is concentrating. For now, the specifics of the new role await confirmation from Anthropic.