Two leading Google artificial intelligence researchers are planning to leave the company for Anthropic, adding to a growing talent drain from the team behind Gemini.

Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are expected to join the Claude maker, according to people familiar with the plans.

Both researchers were viewed internally as important contributors to Google’s artificial intelligence development.

Adler worked on Google’s AI coding efforts, while Pritzel was involved in pretraining, the early stage in which models learn from large volumes of data.

The pair also contributed to Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold research alongside Nobel Prize winner John Jumper.

Their reported departures come shortly after Jumper announced that he was leaving Google DeepMind for Anthropic.

Noam Shazeer, a prominent researcher who helped lead Gemini development, also recently left Google to join OpenAI.

The four exits create another challenge for Google as it competes with Anthropic and OpenAI to develop more capable models and attract enterprise customers.

Google spent much of the current AI boom trying to catch up with its startup rivals before regaining momentum through stronger Gemini models and its custom AI chips.

The recent departures have renewed concerns about whether the company can retain the researchers responsible for its most important advances.

Competition for experienced AI researchers has intensified as Anthropic and OpenAI move closer to potential public listings.

Joining the companies before an initial public offering could give researchers access to significant equity gains that are harder to match at established technology companies.

Anthropic recently raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, overtaking OpenAI and becoming the world’s most valuable private AI company.

The startup has aggressively recruited researchers from Google DeepMind as it expands beyond general purpose models into coding, healthcare and scientific applications.

The departures also come amid internal pressure over access to computing resources.

Shortly before Shazeer announced his move to OpenAI, Google reportedly reassigned computing capacity from one of his projects to another DeepMind team in London.

The change was intended to improve collaboration and consolidate the company’s pretraining work, but resource allocation has become a source of tension as teams compete for limited advanced chips.

Google said it remains confident in its ability to attract and retain AI talent.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said movement between leading laboratories was expected in the current market and argued that Google still had the largest and broadest research team in the industry.