Google is preparing to lose two more prominent artificial intelligence researchers to Anthropic, adding to a recent wave of departures that has raised fresh questions about the company’s ability to hold on to top talent in a highly competitive market.
Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both of whom were seen internally as important contributors to Google’s Gemini AI model, are expected to join the Claude maker, according to people familiar with the matter. Adler worked on AI coding efforts, while Pritzel was involved in training AI systems.
The departures come at a sensitive moment for Google, which spent much of the current AI boom trying to catch up with rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic before improving its own models and chips late last year. Even as the company has made technical progress, it now faces growing pressure from startups that are increasingly able to lure away experienced researchers.
In recent days, Google has already seen two other high-profile exits. Nobel Prize winner John Jumper is leaving for Anthropic, and well-known researcher Noam Shazeer is moving to OpenAI. Those moves have unsettled investors and deepened concerns about whether Google can remain a leader in the race to build more capable AI systems.
Alphabet shares were little changed at the close of trading Wednesday after falling as much as 1.2% during the session.
The situation also underscores the appeal of Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which are approaching public listings and may offer employees the chance to benefit from future stock gains. For researchers at established technology companies, that prospect can be difficult to ignore, especially in a field where experienced talent is in short supply.
Beyond compensation, internal competition for resources appears to be another source of friction. The Bloomberg report said that in at least one case, a Google researcher’s decision to leave was preceded by a shift in how computing resources were allocated. Around the same time, computing power tied to one project was reassigned to a London-based team at Google DeepMind, in an effort to improve coordination and streamline work on pre-training, the phase in which AI models learn from large datasets.
The report said that Google executives remain confident in the company’s position in the talent market. A spokesperson pointed to comments from Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis, who said this week that talent often moves between leading AI labs and that the company wins its share of top hires. He described the competition as extremely intense, calling it the most aggressive the tech industry has seen.
Neither Adler nor Pritzel responded to requests for comment, according to the report. Anthropic also declined to comment.
For Google, the latest departures add to a broader challenge. The company remains one of the most heavily resourced AI organizations in the world, but the pace of movement among researchers shows how quickly the competitive landscape can change. With major players racing to build stronger models, the battle for talent has become nearly as important as the race to develop the technology itself.