Google DeepMind Talent Exodus Deepens — Gemini Coding Lead Jonas Adler and Pretraining Specialist Alexander Pritzel Also Defect to Anthropic
Fortune·high signal
Within roughly a week of the Shazeer and Jumper departures, two more senior DeepMind researchers — Gemini AI-coding lead Jonas Adler and pretraining/AlphaFold contributor Alexander Pritzel — left for Anthropic on June 24, and Fortune (June 23) ran a piece openly questioning whether DeepMind can remain at the AI frontier. Four senior exits in six days, mostly landing at Anthropic and OpenAI, turns isolated hires into a pattern. The concentration at Anthropic suggests a deliberate, well-funded poaching campaign rather than coincidence.