Google DeepMind is losing its grip on elite AI talent, new data shows

Over the last few years, the AI talent market has looked more like a professional sports draft than a conventional hiring cycle.

Cash-rich labs are offering salaries more commonly associated with pro athletes, plus equity packages that can turn early employees into billionaires.

The allure of life-changing paychecks has resulted in elite researchers swapping between rival labs at dizzying speed.

Google DeepMind, which was once the leading destination for many of those researchers—especially in Europe—is now finding itself on the losing side of that contest, according to a new overview of the flow of engineering talent exclusively shared with Fortune .

A new analysis from Zeki Data, UK-based data intelligence company, shows that where OpenAI and Anthropic are making gains in the AI talent market, Google DeepMind and, to some extent, Meta are stumbling.

Interviews with several current and former staff suggest DeepMind’s changing identity has weakened part of its historic appeal.

As Google has pushed to close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic, the lab has become more tightly organized around improving and commercializing Gemini—a shift that some researchers see as displacing the open-ended, long-horizon science that once made DeepMind such a desirable destination for academics.

Three current and two former DeepMind staffers told Fortune the recent string of departures come down to a mix of factors: rival labs like Meta and Microsoft aggressively poaching talent with cash-heavy offers, mounting frustration inside Google over where it stands in the AI race, sinking morale, and the pull of pre-IPO stock at competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

This month alone, Google DeepMind lost Jeff Dean , the company’s long-time chief scientist and a 27-year veteran, alongside senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat and researchers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, who left to launch a startup called Discovery Loop.

On the same afternoon, Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s cofounder and chief executive, said he would step back from day-to-day control of the lab to become its chairman and Alphabet’s chief scientist, handing operational control to CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu.

The new data from Zeki suggests the public exits are part of a broader reversal.

For example, DeepMind’s share of research and advanced-engineering hires across Europe, the Middle East and Africa fell from 49% in 2022–23 to 18.6% in 2025–26—the sharpest market-share drop that Zeki recorded for a major AI lab in any region.

“They had the crown in Europe forever, and then it started to erode from a very high base,” Tom Hurd, founder of Zeki Data, told Fortune .