MANY MINDEDThe team behind AlphaFold scatters as researchers exit for Anthropic
According to the Financial Times, Google DeepMind has broken up the team that built AlphaFold, the system that predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins. Over the past year most of the original authors of the AlphaFold papers were reassigned to other internal projects, a move DeepMind confirmed. Those researchers now work on efforts tied to Google's Gemini language model, enzyme design, nuclear fusion, and genomics, while some moved to Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet drug discovery subsidiary spun out of DeepMind in 2021.
The departures reach beyond reassignment. Nearly a quarter of the full-time DeepMind authors of the original papers have left the company entirely. John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with CEO Demis Hassabis for the AlphaFold work, has announced a move to Anthropic, joined by colleagues Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel. Anthropic launched Claude Science for biology and drug discovery earlier in the year.
AlphaFold made protein structures — once the product of slow, expensive lab work — freely predictable, accelerating research that underpins cheaper drug discovery. Concentrated expertise leaving one roof is not automatically a loss for the field; talent spread across Anthropic, Isomorphic Labs, and its partners Novartis and Eli Lilly could widen the frontier rather than narrow it.
What to watch is whether the science keeps advancing or stalls during the reshuffle. The reporting rests on the Financial Times, with one departure detail from an anonymous DeepMind source, so the internal picture is partial.
Source: The Decoder