AlphaFold Nobel Laureate John Jumper leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic as company launches Claude Science
In a major blow to Google DeepMind, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist John Jumper has left the company to join Anthropic. Jumper, who won the chemistry Nobel for his work on the revolutionary AlphaFold model, joins Anthropic just as it positions itself as the new vanguard of AI-driven science. The move coincides with Anthropic's official launch of Claude Science, a standalone flagship product designed to automate computational biology and drug discovery. The tool can autonomously query databases, write scientific code, and manage high-performance compute clusters. Anthropic's head of life sciences, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, noted that Claude Science is elevated to the same rank as Claude Code. The launch signals a direct challenge to Google's historical dominance in scientific AI, as DeepMind faces setbacks in commercializing its core research. During a live demo, Claude Science developer Alexander Tarashansky demonstrated the system autonomously identifying novel drug candidates for phenylketonuria, a rare genetic disorder, in just a few minutes.
Claude Science is Anthropic’s newest flagship product