Breaking

Shazeer and Jumper Depart Google, Sending Alphabet Shares Down Over 6%

June 22, 2026 at 13:06 EDT

Recruiting & HR
Foundation Models
Funding & M&A

Noam Shazeer, a co-lead of Google's Gemini, is moving to OpenAI, while John Jumper, a Nobel laureate at Google DeepMind, is joining Anthropic — two departures announced within 48 hours. In response, Alphabet shares fell as much as 7.2% on June 22, trading near $346.47 and wiping out roughly $320 billion in market value.

June 2026 · AI Talent War

Google Loses Two Star Researchers in 48 Hours — to OpenAI and Anthropic

Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer is joining OpenAI and DeepMind's Nobel laureate John Jumper is heading to Anthropic. Alphabet shares slid as much as 6.8% on June 22.

−6.8%

Alphabet (GOOGL) intraday drop on June 22

48 hrs

Between the two departure announcements

~$343

Share price after a fall of over $22 from prior close

Who's leaving — and where they're going

Noam Shazeer

VP of Engineering · Gemini co-lead · co-author of "Attention Is All You Need" (2017)

Google → OpenAI

John Jumper

DeepMind VP Engineering Fellow · key AlphaFold contributor · 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry

Google DeepMind → Anthropic

A costly reversal

Google paid roughly $2.7B in 2024 to bring Shazeer's Character.AI team back. Comparing that scale of investment to the single-day market value reaction:

~$2.7B

2024 cost to acquire
Character.AI team

>$22/sh

Drop from prior
close on June 22

Columns shown at illustrative scale to contrast the two figures — not a precise dollar ratio.

Reasons for optimism

Google's capital and compute scale can support a rebuild
Strong revenue base in search and cloud
Some see the moves as bets on positioning, not pay

Reasons for concern

Lost symbolic talent in both consumer (Gemini) and science (AlphaFold) AI
GPT-5.x and Claude/Opus seen leading since late 2025
Gemini ships at longer intervals, trails in developer support

What's still unknown

No specific new roles or fresh benchmark figures were disclosed at announcement. The focus now: how Google rebuilds Gemini's organization, and how OpenAI and Anthropic deploy their new hires in the model race.

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