Anthropic landed a Nobel laureate and a presidential reprieve on the same Friday, an unexpectedly favorable turn for an artificial-intelligence company that spent the past eight days disconnected from its own most advanced models and confidentially preparing an initial public offering.
John Jumper, the Google DeepMind vice president who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating AlphaFold, said on X he would leave the company after nearly nine years to join Anthropic. Hours later, an interview with "The Axios Show" aired in which President Trump said he no longer regards Anthropic as a threat to U.S. national security, softening the posture that drove the Commerce Department's June 12 directive forcing the company to disable global access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models.
The hire
"After nearly nine years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic," Jumper wrote. Demis Hassabis, the DeepMind chief executive who shared the Nobel with Jumper, replied: "What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world, and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine, lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity."
AlphaFold has predicted the structures of more than 200 million proteins. The hire follows Anthropic's April acquisition of stealth biotech Coefficient Bio for $400 million in stock, which brought former Genentech computational biology researchers into a healthcare unit whose chief, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, has said he wants "a meaningful percentage of all of the life science work in the world to run on Claude." Anthropic hosts a science-focused event on June 30.
Jumper's departure also lands one day after Noam Shazeer, co-lead of Google's Gemini models, said he was leaving for OpenAI, the second senior defection from DeepMind in 48 hours.
The reprieve
Asked by Axios whether he considered Anthropic or Chief Executive Dario Amodei a threat to national security, Trump answered: "Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe." He said Amodei had responded to the export directive "very quickly" and "responsibly," and described the Commerce Department's order as having created "tremendous liability" for the administration. Trump did not rule out invoking the Defense Production Act. "I have the power to use a lot of things," he said. "But I'm not sure I have to do that."
The softening follows a closed-door G7 lunch in Évian-les-Bains, France, on Wednesday at which Amodei and Hassabis pitched Trump on a U.S.-led AI coalition, as JSJ reported Thursday. The Commerce Department's June 12 order has not been formally rescinded, and the Pentagon's March supply-chain designation of Anthropic remains in place.
Counterpoint
Today's reporting was sourced entirely from center-leaning outlets, and administration critics who organized this week's open letter from nearly 150 cybersecurity leaders had not publicly responded by press time. As TheNextWeb noted, the Commerce Department operates with considerable independence on export-control matters, and a presidential mood shift does not by itself restore Fable 5 or Mythos 5 to foreign users.
Anthropic's June 30 science event is now the next scheduled marker, both for any Jumper appearance and for any administration follow-through on the Axios signal.