DeepMind AlphaFold team is broken up as authors leave for Anthropic

Google DeepMind has broken up the DeepMind AlphaFold team, reassigning most of the original paper authors over the past year, according to the Financial Times. The move matters because AlphaFold was the lab’s signature proof point for long-horizon AI science, and several key contributors are now moving to Anthropic as frontier AI labs compete for senior research talent.

DeepMind confirmed the changes to the Financial Times. The company said affected researchers are now working on projects tied to Google’s Gemini large language model, as well as enzyme design, nuclear fusion and genomics. Some researchers also moved to Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet drug-discovery company spun out of DeepMind in 2021.

The Financial Times reported that nearly a quarter of the full-time Google DeepMind authors on the original AlphaFold papers have left the company altogether. DeepMind did not disclose a full headcount for the former team or a detailed breakdown of where every researcher was reassigned.

Why did DeepMind break up the AlphaFold team?

The shift reflects a change in how DeepMind is organizing scientific AI work. Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind and leader of its AI for Science team, told the Financial Times that the lab’s prior approach focused on “grand challenges” with a concrete goal for each project, and that “the strategy has evolved.”

Rather than grouping researchers only around single scientific problems such as protein folding, DeepMind is also building Gemini-based systems meant to help scientists and, eventually, automate parts of scientific work. That puts the lab’s science strategy closer to the broader race to build frontier AI agents, where Google is competing with OpenAI and Anthropic.

AlphaFold predicts the three-dimensional shape of proteins from their sequence. Work on the system began in 2018, and it became one of the clearest examples of DeepMind’s bet that dedicated AI research teams could produce scientific advances. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, a vice president and engineering fellow at the company, received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work.

Which AlphaFold researchers are leaving?

The highest-profile departure is Jumper. Earlier this year, he and AlphaFold researcher Jonas Adler moved internally to Google’s “Code Strike” team, a group created to improve Google’s AI coding capabilities as it tries to catch Anthropic and OpenAI. Jumper later announced a move to Anthropic, where he is expected to be joined by Adler and AlphaFold colleague Alexander Pritzel.

An unnamed DeepMind employee told the Financial Times that Jumper, Adler and Pritzel had been “instrumental, important, core members” of the company, and that their exits surprised people inside DeepMind.

DeepMind said it remains proud of its scientific record and AlphaFold’s impact, adding that the project helped inspire Isomorphic Labs, whose stated mission is to rethink drug discovery. Isomorphic has partnerships with Novartis and Eli Lilly. Anthropic, meanwhile, launched Claude Science for biology and drug discovery earlier this year, giving the departing AlphaFold researchers an obvious domain overlap at their new company.

This story draws on original reporting from The Decoder.