Google DeepMind Vice President John Jumper is leaving the company to join Anthropic, marking another major talent loss for Google as competition among leading artificial intelligence labs intensifies.

Jumper announced the move on Friday after nearly nine years at DeepMind. He said he plans to take some time off before beginning his new role at Anthropic.

Google DeepMind and Anthropic both confirmed the departure, although Anthropic has not disclosed what position Jumper will hold.

Jumper is best known for leading the development of AlphaFold, an AI system capable of predicting the three dimensional structures of proteins.

He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with DeepMind Chief Executive Demis Hassabis for their work on protein structure prediction. David Baker was also awarded the prize for computational protein design.

AlphaFold became one of the most prominent examples of artificial intelligence being applied to scientific research, providing researchers with predictions for more than 200 million protein structures.

Jumper had also become involved in Google’s AI coding efforts, an area where the company has faced growing competition from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Anthropic has built momentum around its Claude coding products, while employees and executives at DeepMind have reportedly raised concerns about Google’s strategy for selling AI coding tools to businesses.

Hassabis thanked Jumper for their collaboration and said AlphaFold demonstrated how artificial intelligence could transform science and medicine.

Jumper’s move follows other high profile departures from Google as AI companies compete to recruit leading researchers.

Former Google researcher Noam Shazeer recently joined OpenAI after helping develop the transformer architecture that underpins modern generative AI systems.

The departure gives Anthropic another prominent scientific researcher as the company expands its technical team and competes with Google and OpenAI to develop increasingly capable AI models.