Google DeepMind is losing the researchers who built its best work and the damage is already showing
Six senior AI researchers have left Google DeepMind since early 2026, heading to Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta and erasing roughly $270 billion in Alphabet market cap in a single week. The departures trace back to an April pivot toward an AI coding strike team that widened a culture split between commercial priorities and frontier science. Google's TPU infrastructure and proprietary data remain real advantages, but Gemini now ranks outside the top five on major benchmarks, and the people who built
