Markets GOOGL JUN 24, 2026

Google loses two more Gemini researchers to Anthropic as GOOGL posts worst session in a year

Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are headed to Anthropic, compounding last week's exits of Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper. Alphabet closed down ~5% Monday, its steepest one-day drop since May 2025.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

Two more senior Gemini researchers, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, are leaving Google for Anthropic, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Adler worked on Google’s AI coding effort; Pritzel was involved in training Gemini models. Anthropic declined to comment, and neither researcher responded.

The departures don’t read as isolated. Last Wednesday, Noam Shazeer, vice president of engineering and a Gemini co-lead, announced a move to OpenAI. On Friday, John Jumper, the DeepMind VP and engineering fellow who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize with Demis Hassabis for AlphaFold, disclosed a move to Anthropic after nine years at the company. Four senior researchers in roughly a week, all flowing to pre-IPO rivals.

Markets noticed. GOOGL closed down about 5% Monday, its steepest one-day drop since May 2025 (when shares fell roughly 7%) and the worst session in more than a year. Alphabet underperformed both the Nasdaq and its megacap tech peers. Satya Nadella’s Wall Street Journal interview, in which the Microsoft CEO argued the AI market is increasingly commoditized and called for less reliance on dominant providers, added pressure on a day Alphabet didn’t need any.

The analyst desks weren’t subtle. “losing John is a big loss for Google and there is no way to sugarcoat it,” wrote Wedbush’s Dan Ives. D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria put it more structurally: “Google is losing the war for talent at the frontier of AI.”

There’s a compute story embedded here too. Bloomberg reports that resources dedicated to one of Shazeer’s projects were reassigned to a London-based DeepMind team shortly before his announcement, citing two people familiar with the matter. Internal compute allocation, in other words, is now a retention variable.

The juxtaposition is what stings. Alphabet has raised $141 billion in debt and equity since October to fund its AI build-out. Less than two years ago, in August 2024, it paid $2.7 billion to reabsorb Shazeer via the Character.AI arrangement. He’s now at OpenAI. The capital is staying. The architects aren’t.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.