Two leading artificial intelligence researchers at Alphabet Inc.’s Google are planning to leave for rival Anthropic PBC, according to people familiar with the matter, adding to a series of high-profile departures that risk undercutting the search giant’s position in AI. Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both viewed internally as key contributors to Google’s Gemini AI model, are set to move to the Claude maker, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the information is not public.
Adler worked on the company’s AI coding effort and Pritzel was involved in the process of training artificial intelligence systems.Google, an early pioneer in artificial intelligence, spent much of the current AI boom playing catch-up with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic before hitting its stride late last year with more capable models and chips. In recent days, however, the company had already lost two prominent staffers, with Nobel laureate John Jumper heading to Anthropic and star researcher Noam Shazeer going to OpenAI.
