Google AI Brain Drain Accelerates: Adler, Pritzel Confirmed Departing for Anthropic
Taylor Wilson
Gemini core contributors Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel have confirmed their departure to Anthropic, extending a streak that includes Nobel laureate John Jumper and veteran researcher Noam Shazeer — a talent exodus now driven by rivals' pre-IPO equity packages.
Who left, and what did they do at Google?
Jonas Adler led Google's AI coding efforts; Alexander Pritzel was deeply involved in AI system training. Both were core contributors to the Gemini model.
This means → the departures hit critical links in the model development chain — coding capability and training pipelines are where large-model competition is won or lost.
Both confirmed they are joining Anthropic, the same destination as Nobel laureate Jumper.
Why is the talent drain accelerating now?
In a matter of days, Google lost four heavyweight researchers: Adler and Pritzel to Anthropic, Nobel laureate John Jumper also to Anthropic, and star researcher Noam Shazeer to OpenAI.
In plain terms = Shazeer had been at Google since 2000. Google spent roughly $2.7 billion acquiring his startup Character.AI, partly to bring him back for Gemini — and he still left.
This reflects a structural shift: OpenAI and Anthropic are both preparing for IPOs. The prospect of going public lets them offer top researchers highly attractive equity packages — a powerful recruiting lever in the current window.
Gemini 3.5 Pro is delayed — what does that signal?
Gemini 3.5 Pro, originally slated for June, has been pushed to July. CEO Sundar Pichai had promised a "next month" launch at the May I/O conference.
The model is already available to select users on Google's internal Antigravity platform and benchmark site LMArena. The team is collecting feedback and addressing issues including excessive token consumption.
This means → talent losses and a flagship product delay are happening simultaneously. Anthropic and OpenAI continue to lead in coding AI — the first major enterprise use case — and the departure of key researchers risks widening that gap further.
How are Google and investors responding?
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said talent movement across top labs is normal, noting that Google has the largest and broadest research team of any lab.
Investment bank Jefferies called the departures "noise" that does not change its thesis on Alphabet.
Put simply = the official line is "normal churn," but the real tests are concrete: whether Gemini 3.5 Pro ships on time in July, and whether Google can hold its ground during the buffer period while Jumper — bound by a UK non-compete — cannot formally start at Anthropic until next year at the earliest.
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