Google is watching more of its AI brainpower walk out the door. Two senior researchers who helped build Gemini, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, have moved to Anthropic, adding to a run of departures that is starting to look less like coincidence and more like a hiring war with equity on the table.
The timing is awkward for Google. In the space of days, the company has also lost Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and DeepMind director John Jumper to Anthropic. That is a painful list for any AI unit, but especially for one trying to keep Gemini competitive against rivals that are spending aggressively and dangling ownership stakes to lure top engineers and researchers.
Why Anthropic keeps winning these hires
Anthropic has become a magnet for elite AI talent because it can offer something Google cannot: the upside of a younger company still trying to scale fast. OpenAI and Anthropic are both preparing for public-market ambitions, and that usually makes compensation packages even easier to sell to researchers who already know their work can move markets.
Google, by contrast, has the burden of being the incumbent. It can buy startups, reorganize teams, and ship big models, but it cannot completely match the startup pitch of ”join us early and share in the climb.” That is one reason the company spent $2.7 billion to bring Character.AI into orbit, partly so Shazeer could return; retaining talent is getting expensive in ways that show up far beyond payroll.
Latest Google Gemini departures
Adler and Pritzel were not peripheral names. Their roles in Gemini’s development mean Google is losing people who understand the model stack from the inside, not just the public-facing product. In AI, that kind of institutional memory is hard to replace quickly, which is why competitors keep circling the same small pool of researchers.
- Departures to watch: Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel to Anthropic.
- Recent loss to OpenAI: Noam Shazeer.
- Recent loss to Anthropic: John Jumper, a 2024 Nobel laureate for AlphaFold work.
- Big-money retention move: Google paid $2.7 billion for Character.AI in part to bring Shazeer back.
The talent race is entering a higher-stakes phase
This is what happens when AI turns into a capital markets story as much as a technical one. If OpenAI and Anthropic push toward listings, expect the poaching to get even sharper, because public-company expectations can be sold as both stability and a lottery ticket. Google still has scale, distribution, and deep pockets, but it is now defending its labs like a startup that suddenly discovered everyone else wants its best people.