Google DeepMind has effectively dismantled the team behind Alphafold, the Financial Times reported on July 29. The report said Google reassigned core Alphafold staff and most original paper authors to other units, with some already leaving the company. DeepMind began Alphafold in 2018 and was credited in 2020 with effectively solving the protein-folding problem. In 2024, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the Nobel chemistry prize for the research.

Some of Google’s core artificial intelligence researchers are moving to rivals Anthropic and OpenAI. Bloomberg, cited by TechCrunch, reported that Jonas Adler and Alexander Fritzel will join Anthropic after playing key roles in developing Google’s Gemini model. Noam Shazeer said last week he is moving to OpenAI. Days later, Google DeepMind director John Jumper said he will move to Anthropic.