Alphabet Shares Drop 6% as Top AI Developers Shift to Anthropic and OpenAI

Alphabet shares plummeted 6% on Monday after two of Google’s top AI researchers announced exits to Anthropic and OpenAI. The back-to-back departures wiped out roughly $250 billion in market cap. Wall Street is now openly debating whether Google is falling behind in the war for frontier AI talent.

Google’s Alphabet Shares Saw Heavy Decline Over the Past Week. Source: Google Finance Who Left Google and Where They Are Heading A frontier AI researcher is a scientist whose work shapes the next generation of large language models and foundational systems. Two of the most senior figures at Google just walked out the door, taking their playbook and reputation with them across the table.

John Jumper announced over the weekend that he is leaving Google DeepMind after nearly nine years to join Anthropic. He served as Vice President and Engineering Fellow, leading the team behind AlphaFold2 across his career inside the lab. A bit of news: After nearly 9 years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic (after taking some time to recharge).

I am incredibly grateful for my time at GDM. @demishassabis took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing…— John Jumper (@JohnJumperSci) June 19, 2026 Jumper is not a typical hire.

He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Demis Hassabis for the protein-folding model that already mapped more than 200 million structures. As a result, his move to Anthropic instantly reshapes the credibility map for AI for science. Days earlier, Noam Shazeer made an equally dramatic exit.

The Gemini co-lead and Vice President of Engineering jumped to OpenAI on June 18, less than two years after Google paid $2.7 billion to bring him back through the Character AI acquisition. Shazeer carries even deeper historical weight in the industry.

He co-authored the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper at Google Brain, the foundational work that introduced the Transformer architecture now underlying every majo