Anthropic Raids Google Again As 2 Gemini Researchers Head For The Exit

Two senior Google Gemini researchers plan to leave for Anthropic, adding pressure on the search giant after several high-profile AI exits.

Key Points:

Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are reportedly leaving Google for Anthropic.

The departures follow other recent exits from Google and Google DeepMind.

The moves raise new questions about talent, compute access and pre-IPO equity in frontier AI.

Google Gemini

Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both seen inside Google as important contributors to Gemini, are preparing to join Anthropic, Bloomberg reported Jun. 24, citing people familiar with the matter.

Adler worked on Google’s AI coding efforts, while Pritzel focused on pretraining, the early phase in which models learn from large datasets. Neither company commented on the reported moves, and the departures had not been formally announced at the time of the report.

The exits follow a difficult stretch for Google’s AI teams. Noam Shazeer, a Google engineering vice president and co-author of the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper, left for OpenAI last week.

John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, also said he would leave Google DeepMind after nearly nine years and join Anthropic. His departure helped erase about 6% from Alphabet shares, equal to more than $245B in market value, in one session.

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Anthropic Recruiting

Anthropic has been hiring aggressively from Google DeepMind as it expands beyond general-purpose AI models into coding, health care and scientific work. Those areas make researchers with coding, pretraining and scientific backgrounds especially valuable.

Money is part of the shift, but it is not the only factor. Anthropic and OpenAI are approaching possible public listings, giving recruits a chance to receive pre-IPO equity that may carry more upside than stock at an already massive public company.

Compute access also matters. Inside Google, some researchers have had to compete for access to tensor processing units as outside customers absorb more capacity, and Anthropic is among the external buyers of that hardware.

Google still has the money, infrastructure and history to rebuild teams after departures. The sharper issue is whether the recent run of exits starts to look like a signal to other researchers weighing whether to stay.