Alphabet shares fell sharply after a series of high-profile AI researcher departures. GOOGL shares dropped as much as 7.2% intraday on June 22, closing down roughly 5% in the company’s worst single-day performance in over a year. Noam Shazeer, a contributor to Google’s Gemini models, announced around June 18 he was leaving for OpenAI. Two days later, John Jumper, a Nobel Prize-winning VP at DeepMind and co-creator of AlphaFold, revealed he was heading to Anthropic. On June 24, reports surfaced that Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel were also departing for Anthropic. By June 25, shares slipped another 1.3% in premarket trading. Jumper’s AlphaFold system helped earn DeepMind a Nobel Prize in 2024. Shazeer’s contributions to the Gemini model architecture represented core intellectual property for Google’s flagship AI products. OpenAI and Anthropic have been courting top researchers with compensation packages and promises of greater scientific autonomy. Google DeepMind was formed in 2023 through a merger intended partly to reduce internal friction and retain talent. The current wave follows a history of notable exits, including the 2021 departure of researchers who established Character.AI.