Alphabet Shares Fall Premarket After Report on Further AI Talent Departures — Update

By Joe Stonor

Alphabet shares fell further premarket following a report that two researchers key to Google's artificial-intelligence model left the group, extending an exodus in top talent from the search company's AI team.

Shares in the Google owner slid 1.3% to $340.82 in premarket trade even as the broader tech complex rallied. The fall deepens a selloff prompted by the departure of AI architects last week, with shares set to open 7.4% lower than their close Thursday before the Juneteenth holiday.

Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are planning to leave Google for Anthropic, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources. The pair are leading researchers behind Google's Gemini model, which is a rival to Anthropic's Claude range.

Alphabet stock fell 5% Monday--its biggest one-day decline in over a year--after AI heavyweights John Jumper and Noam Shazeer said they were leaving the company for Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively.

Adler and Pritzel weren't immediately available for comment. Google and Anthropic didn't reply to a request for comment.

Speaking at a Cannes event earlier this week, Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google's AI lab DeepMind, said that Google was holding its own amid fierce competition for talent among AI labs.

"We have by far the biggest and broadest research bench of any of the labs out there," Hassabis said.

Several junior researchers and engineers have also left Google in recent days.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply content on Google platforms.

Write to Joe Stonor at josephmichael.stonor@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 25, 2026 09:05 ET (13:05 GMT)