Alphabet shares stumble over 7% amid high-profile exits in AI department

Alphabet Inc., the company that owns and runs search giant Google, saw its shares stumble on Monday. This came to pass after the departure of another prominent artificial intelligence leader to a competitor.

Following Google DeepMind Vice President John Jumper's announcement over the weekend that he was heading to Anthropic, the stock dropped as much as 7.2%, the biggest intraday since February. One of Google's most well-known researchers, Noam Shazeer, announced his departure for OpenAI last week.

According to a Bloomberg report that cited former employees, Google has had trouble selling AI coding tools to businesses, which is why Jumper, a crucial member of the company's AI coding development team, left. Additionally, in recent months, Anthropic and OpenAI have gained popularity in this domain.

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As part of a collaboration with the company Character, Shazeer and fellow researcher Daniel De Freitas returned to Google's DeepMind AI division in August 2024. After departing Google in 2021, the two established AI.

The departure occurred a few weeks after Google's annual I/O developer conference revealed new AI technologies, such as its Gemini Spark AI agent and Gemini 3.5 Flash model.

The decline in Alphabet coincides with a wider decline in other megacap tech stocks. Microsoft and Meta Platforms Inc. both had declines of more than 3%, while Amazon saw a 5% decline.

Jumper and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize for developing AlphaFold, an AI model that can predict protein structures.

 

(With Inputs from Bloomberg and CNBC)