Mumbai: The AI talent race is getting crowded, and Google DeepMind appears to be losing some of its early lead. New data cited by Fortune shows a steep decline in the laboratory’s share of elite research and advanced-engineering hires across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as rivals including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta compete aggressively for top researchers.
According to an analysis by UK-based data intelligence firm Zeki Data, DeepMind accounted for 49 per cent of research and advanced-engineering hires in the EMEA region in 2022-23. That share fell to 18.6 per cent in 2025-26, which Zeki described as the steepest decline recorded for a major AI laboratory in any region.
The shift comes as rival AI companies expand their research teams and offer researchers an increasingly attractive combination of compensation, ambitious projects and equity opportunities.
DeepMind is still hiring more researchers and advanced engineers than it loses, but the gap has narrowed considerably. Zeki’s data showed its arrivals-to-departures ratio falling from roughly 12-to-1 in the second quarter of 2023 to about 2-to-1 in the third quarter of 2026.
Rivals have meanwhile strengthened their ability to attract departing DeepMind employees. Of researchers and advanced engineers who left DeepMind over the past year, 25 per cent moved to Anthropic, 21 per cent joined Meta and 14 per cent went to OpenAI, according to Zeki.
The corresponding arrivals-to-departures ratios were around 22-to-1 for Anthropic, 5.7-to-1 for OpenAI and 3-to-1 for Meta in the periods covered by Zeki’s analysis.
The numbers coincide with a series of high-profile departures from DeepMind.
Jeff Dean, the company’s long-serving chief scientist, left after 27 years and joined Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le in launching AI startup Discovery Loop.
Other prominent researchers, including David Silver, Wojciech Czarnecki and Lasse Espeholt, have also left DeepMind. Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou departed in 2024 to establish Reflection AI.
The movement has extended to some of DeepMind’s best-known AI projects.
In June, Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer left DeepMind for OpenAI, following Google’s reported $2.7 billion deal to bring him back from Character.AI. John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Demis Hassabis for work on AlphaFold, also moved to Anthropic.
Several AlphaFold researchers, including Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, subsequently followed Jumper.
The impact is particularly visible around AlphaFold, one of DeepMind’s most celebrated research achievements. Zeki found that 13 of the 29 named authors of the AlphaFold2 paper have since left DeepMind.
The laboratory continues to attract researchers in other areas, including robotics, embodied AI and machine learning for science. Its research portfolio has also expanded into fields such as enzyme design, genomics and nuclear fusion.
But the talent losses appear to be particularly relevant in some of the fields driving the current AI race. Zeki found that 19.2 per cent of people leaving DeepMind over the past 12 months specialised in large language models and multimodal systems, compared with 15.6 per cent of incoming hires. The analysis also identified losses in computer vision.
DeepMind’s changing research environment may also be influencing employee decisions.
The company has introduced tighter internal review procedures and, for some strategically sensitive generative-AI research, a six-month publication embargo, according to a Financial Times report cited in the supplied material.
DeepMind has said it remains committed to publishing research while updating its policies to protect its teams’ ability to contribute to the wider research community.
Current and former employees cited by Fortune pointed to several factors behind the departures, including aggressive recruitment from competitors, concerns about Google’s position in the AI race, lower morale and the prospect of lucrative pre-IPO equity at companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
The battle for AI researchers is becoming almost as important as the battle for computing power. DeepMind still has one of the world’s deepest pools of scientific talent, but the latest figures suggest that maintaining that advantage will require more than its historic reputation.