Google DeepMind Disbands Nobel Prize-Winning AlphaFold Team as Key Researchers Defect to Anthropic

Google DeepMind has quietly disbanded its Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold team less than a year after its historic 2024 Nobel Prize, with key researchers including Nobel co-winner John Jumper defecting to rival Anthropic, which just launched Claude Science to target the biology and drug-discovery space AlphaFold helped pioneer.

• Google DeepMind has quietly disbanded its Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold team, reassigning most original researchers and losing nearly a quarter of them entirely, less than a year after the breakthrough earned a Nobel Prize in 2024.
• DeepMind is shifting away from its 'grand challenge' strategy of dedicating focused teams to single hard problems, now pivoting toward building Gemini-powered 'AI scientist' systems designed to automate and assist scientific research broadly.
• Key AlphaFold talent, including Nobel co-winner John Jumper and core researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, have defected to rival Anthropic, which just launched Claude Science — a platform targeting the exact biology and drug-discovery space AlphaFold helped pioneer.