John Jumper, who recently nabbed a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on AlphaFold, has announced he's leaving Google DeepMind after nearly nine years to join rival AI company Anthropic.

In a post on X, Jumper thanked DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for taking a real chance by letting him lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing his PhD, adding that the entire DeepMind team taught him a lot about how to do great science. He also noted that DeepMind is a special place and he'll still be excited to hear about their future discoveries.

Bloomberg reports that Jumper was a key member of Google's team developing coding tools, which the company has struggled to sell to businesses. This news comes alongside Character AI co-founder Noam Shazeer also announcing this week that he's leaving DeepMind, though in Shazeer's case, he's joining OpenAI.

Jumper and Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in 2024 for their work on AlphaFold, an AI model that can predict the 3D structure of proteins based on their genetic sequences - a breakthrough that apparently doesn't come with a non-compete clause.