Google DeepMind is effectively dismantling the team behind AlphaFold—the project that cemented the lab’s place in scientific history. According to the Financial Times, the core group of researchers has either been reassigned to service divisions or has left the company entirely. John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Demis Hassabis, has moved to Anthropic. He is joined by key developers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel. This migration is more than mere turnover; it is a total surrender to the need to feed the insatiable Gemini model.
From fundamental science to Gemini support
Internal restructuring marks the end of the "Grand Challenges" era. Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind’s VP of Research, confirmed in an interview with the FT that the strategy has shifted: instead of solving specific fundamental problems like protein folding, the focus is now on building tools powered by Gemini. Scientists are no longer expected to deliver breakthroughs, but to automate routine tasks. Panicked by the lead OpenAI and Anthropic have in agents and coding, Google is turning Nobel laureates into a support desk for its chatbot.
“Our strategy for the last nine years was to focus on the grand challenges... a specific goal for every project. Now the strategy has evolved,” explains Pushmeet Kohli, VP of Research at Google DeepMind.
This "evolution" was felt firsthand by Jumper and Adler, who were temporarily reassigned to the "Code Strike" group—an internal task force struggling to close Gemini’s gap in software engineering. Apparently, the prospect of patching software bugs was less inspiring than biology, as they chose to join Anthropic instead. With a quarter of the original research authors gone, the intellectual heart of AlphaFold has de facto ceased to exist.
Undermining the commercial foundation of Isomorphic Labs
The mass exodus threatens Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet subsidiary created to monetize AI-driven pharmaceuticals. The company holds contracts with giants like Novartis and Eli Lilly, yet it suddenly finds itself severed from the architects of its core technology. While DeepMind publicly touts the impact of AlphaFold, the loss of key expertise calls into question Isomorphic’s ability to fulfill its drug discovery obligations. Meanwhile, Anthropic is already targeting this market with the launch of Claude Science.
By consolidating resources around a single universal model, Google is intentionally dismantling the specialized teams that made it a leader in AI biology and nuclear fusion. Scientists are being repurposed as "high-level labelers" for Gemini’s training. Anthropic wins twice: it gains the world’s top specialists and occupies the deep scientific research niche that Google has voluntarily vacated in its desperate bid to reclaim market share from ChatGPT.