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Google DeepMind, one of the world’s most influential AI labs, is undergoing a major leadership shake-up. As the Financial Times reports, Sir Demis Hassabis, the lab’s founder and outgoing CEO, is stepping back from his operational role to become chairman of DeepMind as well as chief scientist of parent company Alphabet. According to the report, Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously the unit’s chief technology officer, will take over as operational lead, becoming senior vice president and reporting directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

As Axios reports, chief scientist Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran, is leaving the company at the same time to found his own start-up, Discovery Loop – an independent public benefit corporation in which Google will invest as both a backer and cloud provider. According to the same report, several other prominent figures are joining him: Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, DeepMind vice president Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, co-founder of Google Brain.

The announcement triggered a sell-off: Google’s stock fell by roughly 4 to 5 percent following the news, after having rallied sharply since the company’s most recent earnings report.

Context: Consolidation, Not a Break

As the Financial Times frames it, the personnel move fits into a broader series of reorganizations at Google as the company tries to keep pace with rivals OpenAI and Anthropic – particularly in AI coding agents, an area where Google has recently lagged behind. According to the report, the company had already restructured its Nobel Prize-winning research team in recent months and shifted talent toward its Gemini division; it had also assembled an internal “Code Strike” team to catch up on AI coding tools. Several senior researchers, including David Silver and John Jumper, had already left DeepMind, the Financial Times notes.

Citing a person familiar with the matter, the Financial Times reports that Hassabis’s move away from day-to-day management was not a sudden decision, but is meant to give him space to focus on bigger questions surrounding artificial general intelligence (AGI) – including helping shape future AI regulation. DeepMind itself will not become purely commercial, the report adds, but will be integrated more closely into Google’s broader organization.

The Statements

According to reporting from both the Financial Times and Axios, Hassabis told staff in a memo that the world has reached a pivotal moment in human history and that AGI feels close at hand. He said he now wants more time and space to focus on the bigger picture rather than day-to-day operations.

Pichai and Kavukcuoglu also struck an upbeat tone in internal memos, according to Axios. Pichai reportedly pointed to the company’s strength in talent, computing infrastructure, and product reach, and called for accelerating the pace of work at the AI frontier. Kavukcuoglu, for his part, said Google DeepMind’s mission of building AI responsibly for humanity’s benefit remains unchanged, and that his main focus is ensuring a clear path to delivering on the Gemini roadmap.

Per Axios, citing an interview with The New York Times, Jeff Dean explained his move by saying that operating outside a public company gives him more freedom to pursue scientific questions, even ones that might not be strictly in a company’s financial interest.

Context: Unrest Within the Ranks

As Axios reports, Google DeepMind has recently seen discontent among staff, accompanied by several high-profile departures – among them, reportedly, Gemini’s co-lead, who has since left for a competitor. The rollout of Gemini 3.5 Pro has been delayed in part due to low morale on the team, according to the same report.

Roles That Remain

Per Axios, alongside his new dual role as chairman and Alphabet chief scientist, Hassabis will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, DeepMind’s AI-driven drug discovery spinoff. For his work on AlphaFold, which predicts the 3D structure of proteins, Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper, the report notes.

As the Financial Times reports, author Sebastian Mallaby, who has written a biography of Hassabis, characterizes the shake-up less as an abrupt break than as the formalization of a division of labor that had already been in place: Hassabis, he says, has increasingly been playing the role of AI statesman, while Kavukcuoglu had effectively already been running the lab’s research.

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