Some of Google’s key artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are moving to Anthropic.

A Bloomberg report cited by TechCrunch on Tuesday said Jonas Adler and Alexander Fritzel will leave Google and join Anthropic. The two are seen as having played key roles in developing Google’s AI model Gemini.

At Google, Noam Shazeer said last week that he will move to OpenAI. Shazeer has been at Google since 2000, and has led Google AI research for a long period except for three years when he founded chatbot startup Character.AI (Character.AI).

Google had earlier brought Shazeer back into Gemini development through a deal structured as an effective acquisition of Character.AI worth $2.7 billion, but Shazeer ultimately left Google and chose OpenAI.

The departures did not end there. A few days after Shazeer’s announcement, Google DeepMind director John Jumper also said he will move to Anthropic. Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold research results together with Demis Hassabis (데미스 허사비스), DeepMind’s chief executive. AlphaFold is known as a technology that predicts a protein’s three-dimensional structure based on its amino acid sequence.

The weight of the talent moves is not small. Bloomberg pointed to Adler and Fritzel as having played central roles in developing the Gemini model, and Jumper has also been regarded as a figure who led signature research results at Google DeepMind.

The market is paying attention to the possibility that this trend could continue for the time being. As OpenAI and Anthropic enter a phase of preparing initial public offerings, the two companies could move more aggressively to recruit top AI talent by offering equity compensation. Under the current competitive structure, not only research results but also expectations of a rise in future corporate value could act as a factor in workforce moves.

In this situation, Google has taken on the tasks of maintaining Gemini’s competitiveness while also defending its core research team. In particular, the fact that the recent job changers are all directly linked to Google’s emblematic research projects such as large AI models or AlphaFold shows that competition to secure talent is becoming as intense as the race in technology.