Google Stock Plunges Over 7% as Key AI Researchers Exit to Anthropic and OpenAI

① Google shares fell more than 7% in intraday trading on Monday, triggered by the departure of two key AI talents who joined Anthropic and OpenAI respectively.
② Market concerns are growing that, as competition in AI agents intensifies, Google is visibly lagging in product deployment and commercialization momentum, making it harder to justify large-scale AI investments.

June 23 (Info) – Following the departure of two top AI researchers, Google (Alphabet), which last year formed the “AI Big Three” alongside OpenAI and Anthropic, experienced its worst trading day in nearly a year on Monday.

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As of the time of writing, Google fell over 6%, with an intraday loss exceeding 7% at one point.

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(Source: TradingView)

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The direct trigger for the sell-off appears to be the announcement that John Jumper, Vice President at Google DeepMind, is leaving Google to join major competitor Anthropic. Jumper, along with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts protein structures.

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(Stockholm, Sweden, December 10, 2024 – John Jumper displays his medal)

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Also last week, Noam Shazeer, Vice President of Engineering at Google DeepMind, announced his departure on social media to join OpenAI, where he will lead research on AI architecture.

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Shazeer is one of the co-authors of the seminal 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which described the transformer architecture that underlies today’s generative AI.

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Due to Google’s slow pace in integrating generative AI into its products, Shazeer left the company in 2021 to found the chatbot startup Character.AI. In 2024, Google re-hired Shazeer through a $2.5 billion licensing agreement, entrusting him with co-leading the development of the Gemini AI model.

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With two key figures consecutively leaving for competitors, it is no wonder that the market is speculating negatively about what is happening at Google.

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From a product perspective, in 2026, as Anthropic and OpenAI engage in intense competition in the AI agent arena, Google’s presence appears notably subdued.

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Last week, media reports cited former Google employees alleging that Google has been “struggling” to sell its AI coding tools to enterprises.

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Late last year, with the release of Gemini 3, Google was widely regarded as a frontrunner in the AI sector. However, in the AI coding tools and productivity track, the company has consistently failed to deliver competitive alternatives. At the annual I/O developer conference held in mid-January, Google launched multiple products, including the Gemini 3.5 Flash model and the Spark AI agent, but these failed to generate significant market reaction.

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As its momentum in the AI race diminishes, the negative impact of massive AI investments becomes increasingly difficult to contain. Since October last year, Alphabet has raised $141 billion through a combination of debt and equity offerings.

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Meanwhile, competitor Microsoft appears to be deliberately provoking an “AI price war.” Over the past weekend, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella publicly criticized the situation where “AI giants are devouring the economy.” He stated that “a few companies” are capturing the value of this technology while making dire predictions about security risks and unemployment, claiming they need vast resources to achieve unlimited expansion. He warned that “the public will not tolerate a situation where only a few models and companies handle all the world’s learning.”

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Last week, Microsoft introduced the Copilot Cowork intelligent agent AI, claiming that each prompt costs an average of 30–40% less than Claude Cowork. There are also rumors that Microsoft is considering hosting top open-source models like DeepSeek to drive agent products, further significantly reducing costs.

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