John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for developing AlphaFold, the AI system that predicted over 200 million protein structures and measurably shortened drug discovery research cycles, announced on June 19 that he is leaving DeepMind after nearly nine years to join Anthropic (TechCrunch). The move followed by two days the announcement from Noam Shazeer, a Google vice president of engineering and co-lead of the Gemini model family, that he is joining OpenAI (9to5Google). The back-to-back departures represent one of the sharpest single-week concentrations of senior AI research talent leaving a single lab, and Alphabet shares fell 7% as the news became broadly public on June 22 (Cryptobriefing, Search Engine Journal).
Shazeer co-authored the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper that introduced the transformer architecture on which virtually every major language model in production today is based (CNBC). He had returned to Google in 2024 to help lead Gemini development after co-founding Character.ai, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly welcomed the hire in a post describing Shazeer as someone he had wanted to work with since the company’s founding (CNBC). Anthropic has not disclosed what role Jumper will take, but his hiring continues a pattern of the lab recruiting researchers with deep scientific credentials: Andrej Karpathy announced in May 2026 that he had joined Anthropic to lead a team using Claude to accelerate pre-training research (TechCrunch).
As of June 23, Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models remain suspended following the US export-control directive issued June 12, with the free subscription window for both models expiring as scheduled on June 22 without extension (Anthropic). The Globe and Mail reported that Anthropic and Trump administration officials are in active negotiations on conditions for restoring access, with Anthropic’s international managing director stating the company is confident the models will return within days (The Globe and Mail). The directive barred all access by foreign nationals, a restriction Anthropic said it could not implement selectively, resulting in a full global shutdown; Anthropic has contested the proportionality of the response, arguing the jailbreak technique cited by the government was narrow and that applying the same standard uniformly would halt all new frontier model deployments across the industry (Fortune). Other Anthropic models including Claude Opus 4.8 remain available and were not covered by the directive.