Google is facing renewed pressure in the artificial intelligence race after two more senior researchers were reportedly set to leave for Anthropic, adding to a series of high-profile departures that have raised questions about the company’s ability to hold on to top AI talent.
Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, two leading artificial intelligence researchers at Google and are said to both played key roles in the development of Google’s Gemini model, are planning to leave for Anthropic.
Gemini Contributors Reportedly Head to Anthropic
The departures are notable because both researchers were tied to Google’s most important AI work.
Bloomberg reported that Adler and Pritzel were both viewed internally as key contributors to Google’s Gemini AI model.
The Economic Times said that Adler worked on Google’s AI coding effort while Pritzel was involved in training artificial intelligence systems.
The move adds to the perception that Anthropic is pulling talent from one of the industry’s most important AI labs.
Anthropic has aggressively siphoned talent from Google and that DeepMind engineers are nearly 11 times more likely to leave for Anthropic than the reverse, according to a 2025 industry analysis from venture capital firm SignalFire.
Shazeer and Jumper Exits Add to Investor Worries
The latest reported moves follow other prominent exits from Google’s AI ranks.
TechCrunch reported that Noam Shazeer, described as a legendary AI researcher, announced last week that he was leaving Google for OpenAI after first joining the company in 2000. Shazeer had spent three years building Character.AI before Google effectively acqui-hired the startup for $2.7 billion partly to bring him back to work on Gemini.
John Jumper’s exit also carries symbolic weight. Google DeepMind director John Jumper said he was leaving Google for Anthropic after winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for work on AlphaFold. Jumper had become a face of Google’s most ambitious AI work after his Nobel-winning research using AI to predict protein folding.
The market reaction showed that investors are paying attention. The moves rattled investors and cast doubt on Google’s ability to compete in the race to build better models. Alphabet shares closed down slightly after falling as much as 1.2% during Wednesday’s trading day.
Google Says the AI Talent Market Is Fiercely Competitive
Google has pushed back against the idea that it is losing its edge. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that there is a lot of talent movement between leading labs and that Google wins its fair share of the top talent. Hassabis shared that the AI talent market is the most ferociously competitive it has ever been in the tech industry.
Still, the departures come at a difficult time for Google. Google spent much of the current AI boom playing catch-up with OpenAI and Anthropic before gaining momentum late last year with more capable models and chips.
Search Dominance Faces AI-Era Pressure
The talent drain is unfolding as Google’s core search dominance faces new pressure from AI tools and rival search products.
CNBC reported that Google still controls 90% of the search market, but its online dominance is showing signs of cracking in the AI era.
DuckDuckGo install rates are jumping by up to 40% a week, Microsoft’s Bing reached 1 billion users for the first time last quarter, and Google search traffic is down slightly over the past month while ChatGPT is up a tick.
That broader shift makes the AI hiring race more than a staffing story. Google is not only defending Gemini; it is also defending the search business that made it one of the most powerful companies on the internet.
If Anthropic and OpenAI continue attracting Google’s senior AI researchers, the pressure on Gemini will grow. For Google, the challenge is now clear: keep proving that its massive research bench can still compete, even as some of its most visible talent moves to rivals.
