Google appears to be hemorrhaging key AI researchers to competitors. Bloomberg reports that Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are planning to join Anthropic. Both are considered important figures behind Google's Gemini AI model. Adler worked on AI-powered coding, Pritzel on training AI systems. Just days earlier, Nobel laureate John Jumper announced his move to Anthropic, and Gemini lead Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI.

The departures spooked investors and dragged down Alphabet's stock. One likely reason for the exodus: Anthropic and OpenAI are both approaching IPOs and can offer employees lucrative equity packages. A SignalFire analysis found that Deepmind engineers switch to Anthropic eleven times more often than the other way around. Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis pushed back at an event in Cannes, saying Google has the deepest research bench of any AI lab.