Alphabet shares slid 7% on Monday morning. The company underperformed the Nasdaq and other megacap peers during the same period.

The stock decline followed announcements that two artificial intelligence leaders, Noam Shazeer and John Jumper, were departing Google. Shazeer, Google's vice president of engineering and a co-lead of its Gemini AI models, announced on Wednesday that he was leaving to join OpenAI. Jumper, a DeepMind vice president and engineering fellow, announced his departure on Friday to join Anthropic.

Shazeer returned to Google less than two years before his departure announcement, having rejoined the company's DeepMind AI unit in August 2024 with Daniel De Freitas. Their return was part of a partnership with Character.AI, a startup they co-founded after leaving Google in 2021.

Jumper won a Nobel prize in 2024 alongside Demis Hassabis. He is recognized as the co-creator of AlphaFold, a system that has predicted over 200 million protein structures. Jumper worked at Google for nine years before his departure announcement.

In other developments on Monday, Google users reported outages affecting Gmail and YouTube. Since October, Alphabet has raised $141 billion in debt and equity. Google recently unveiled the Gemini 3.5 Flash model and the Gemini Spark AI agent at its annual I/O developer conference.

Why It Matters

The departures of key personnel in artificial intelligence leadership occurred as Alphabet's stock experienced a decline. The movement of these researchers to rival companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic reflects competition for talent and innovation in artificial intelligence. These events follow Alphabet's recent efforts to launch new AI models and secure funding.