Four senior AI researchers have left Google in the past few weeks, and the through-line isn’t pay or position—it’s a city. Most of those walking out of DeepMind for Anthropic and OpenAI are based in London, and that’s the detail worth following. The latest to go are Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both described by people familiar with the matter as central to Google’s Gemini model. Adler worked on the company’s AI coding push; Pritzel sat inside the training pipeline that teaches models how to behave. Both are headed to Anthropic, the Claude maker that has spent the past year quietly draining Google’s research bench. They follow John Jumper, the Nobel laureate who co-led AlphaFold, and Noam Shazeer, a co-author of the 2017 transformer paper who left for OpenAI after more than two decades at the company. Google said it remains confident in its standing in the AI talent market.
The legal reason Jumper joins Anthropic next year, not now
Here’s where geography starts to matter. DeepMind’s research leadership is based in London, and AI researchers in the UK are routinely bound by long non-compete agreements—the kind British law actually enforces, unlike California, where such clauses are largely void. That legal gap shows up in the fine print of these exits. Jumper, according to a person familiar with his plans, won’t begin work at Anthropic until next year, a delay that reads less like a sabbatical and more like a contractual cooling-off period.The London thread runs through the smaller names too. Arthur Conmy, who announced he’s joining Anthropic to work on model alignment, said plainly that he’s moving from London to San Francisco for the role. He isn’t a household name like Jumper. But he’s another data point in the same direction: out of DeepMind’s London orbit, into a US lab.Researcher Lucas Beyer caught the pattern early, noting that the recent departures are mostly long-time Londoners, and tied it to something structural—the center of gravity for pre-training, the foundational phase where models learn from enormous datasets, appears to be drifting toward Mountain View. If the most important work is migrating to California, the London researchers who built their careers in the UK have a clear reason to follow it, non-competes permitting.That migration theory gets support from inside Google’s own decisions. Shortly before Shazeer left, computing power assigned to one of his projects was reportedly reallocated to a London-based DeepMind team to improve collaboration on pre-training. Compute is the currency of this field, and watching it move is often how researchers learn where they stand.
Why the timing favors the rivals, not Google
The geography only explains who is leaving. The timing explains why now. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are circling public listings, and a pre-IPO offer carries something a salary can’t match—equity that could turn into a defining payday the moment the stock starts trading. For a senior researcher weighing a stable role at Google against a stake in a company about to go public, the math is uncomfortable for the incumbent.The numbers around Anthropic make the pull harder to resist. The company recently raised at a valuation near $965 billion, overtaking OpenAI, and is weighing a public listing as soon as this fall. It competes with Google and partners with it at the same time, which makes each defection sting twice. A 2025 analysis from venture firm SignalFire found DeepMind engineers were roughly eleven times more likely to leave for Anthropic than the other way around—a ratio that turns individual exits into something closer to a current.Investors noticed before the commentary did. Alphabet shares fell as much as 7.2% intraday after Jumper’s exit, the steepest drop since February, as the broader megacap group also softened. A stock that moves on a single researcher’s departure is a stock priced for a talent war it’s now visibly losing ground in.DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis pushed back at an event in Cannes, calling the market the most ferociously competitive the tech industry has seen and insisting Google wins its share of top people. He’s not wrong about the intensity. But four senior departures in two weeks, most of them tracing back to the same city and the same shifting compute, suggest the competition isn’t just fierce. It’s geographic—and right now the map is pointing away from London.
