DeepMind Is Losing Its Best Minds to Rivals

Google DeepMind spent a decade as the most prestigious address in artificial intelligence research. New hiring data suggests that pull is fading, and fading fast. According to figures from the talent-tracking firm Zeki Data, reported by Fortune, the lab's share of senior AI hires across Europe, the Middle East and Africa has fallen from 49 percent in 2022 and 2023 to 18.6 percent across 2025 and 2026.

The direction of travel is what worries people inside the company. In the second quarter of 2023, DeepMind hired roughly twelve researchers for every one it lost. By the third quarter of 2026 that ratio had dropped to two to one. Of the researchers who walked out, about a quarter went to Anthropic, a fifth to Meta and roughly one in seven to OpenAI.

A widening growth gap

Part of the problem is arithmetic. Rivals are simply expanding faster. Zeki's data puts Anthropic's annual headcount growth in research and engineering at about 152 percent and OpenAI's at 97 percent. DeepMind, by comparison, is growing at 27 percent. When a field runs this hot, standing still means falling behind.

The names leaving carry weight. Jeff Dean, who spent 27 years at Google and served as its chief scientist, has departed. So has Sanjay Ghemawat, one of the architects of Google's core infrastructure. Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, both senior figures in the lab's language and reasoning work, have left to start a company called Discovery Loop. John Jumper, who shared a 2024 Nobel Prize for the AlphaFold protein-structure work, has joined Anthropic. David Silver, a pioneer of the reinforcement learning that powered AlphaGo, founded his own venture, Ineffable Intelligence. Of the 29 authors named on the original AlphaFold2 paper, 13 have now moved on.

"They had the crown in Europe forever, and then it started to erode from a very high base," Tom Hurd, founder of Zeki Data, told Fortune.

Leadership in flux

The exodus lands at an awkward moment. Earlier this month DeepMind reshuffled its leadership. Co-founder Demis Hassabis moved from chief executive to chairman, and Koray Kavukcuoglu, the lab's chief technology officer, took over day-to-day operations. The stated aim was to sharpen focus on the Gemini model line, which has not seen a new flagship release this year while OpenAI and Anthropic have shipped repeatedly.

None of this means DeepMind is finished as a research power. It still has Alphabet's compute and money behind it, along with a bench of talent most labs would envy. But reputations in this industry rest on the people who choose to stay, and the past three years have handed a striking number of them to the competition. The open question is whether Kavukcuoglu can turn DeepMind back into a place the field's best want to build, rather than a place they used to work.