Google is undergoing a major shakeup in its artificial intelligence (AI) leadership. Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become its Chair and Chief Scientist at Alphabet, Google's parent company.

Meanwhile, Jeff Dean, chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, is leaving after a 27-year stint to launch Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation, alongside fellow AI researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le.

Google will be a founding investor and cloud partner for Discovery Loop, and the two organizations will collaborate on a research framework for machine learning (ML) systems and related infrastructure advances, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a memo to employees.

The leadership changes come at a critical juncture for Google, which is locked in an intense battle for AI dominance with rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic while also facing a looming threat from fast-rising Chinese AI companies like Moonshot and DeepSeek.

Google's next frontier AI model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, has yet to be publicly released despite a planned June launch, raising concerns that the company could lose momentum in its race with Anthropic and OpenAI, which continue to roll out new AI models at a rapid pace.

The tech giant has also lost several senior AI researchers in recent months, including Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer, who joined OpenAI, and Nobel laureate John Jumper, who left for Anthropic.

Why is Demis Hassabis stepping down as DeepMind CEO?

Hassabis said the new role will allow him to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs.

"I’ve been working towards AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," Hassabis said in a memo to employees. "It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder"

Hassabis said he will continue to work closely with Pichai on strategic and global AGI matters. He will also advise Google DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google VP Josh Woodward, and Google DeepMind teams across models and research areas from the company's London Platform 37 offices.

"(Hassabis) and I have been long discussing a ​role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI," Pichai said in an employee memo. "It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it."

Hassabis will also continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, the company's AI drug discovery spinoff, which recently raised $2.1 billion funding led by existing investor Thrive Capital and participation from Alphabet and its corporate investment arms GV and CapitalG among other investors.

"I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health," Hassabis said. "It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer."

How will be Google DeepMind's new leader?

Kavukcuoglu will take over day-to-day leadership as senior vice president of Google DeepMind, reporting to Pichai, while retaining his existing role as Google's Chief AI Architect.

The 13-year company veteran will oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams.

"The Gemini models are in good hands with Koray and the leads, as they have been for a while, and I'm excited about the great progress we’re making with our new models including Gemini 4," Hassabis said.

Pichai also wrote that Google "has amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company....We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier."

In June, Alphabet announced an $85 billion equity offering to fund its AI investment spree. The deal marked the company's first equity sale since 2006 and the largest equity offering in history. It came ahead of SpaceX's blockbuster IPO and the anticipated public listings of Anthropic and OpenAI.

A fortnight ago, Google parent Alphabet raised its capital expenditure plans for the year 2026 to $195 billion-$205 billion, up from its previous guidance of $180 billion-$190 billion, as it ramps up investment in the computing infrastructure needed to advance its AI ambitions.

What does Jeff Dean's new startup Discovery Loop do?

Jeff Dean's startup Discovery Loop will focus on automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress.

Jeff Dean will be joined by his longtime collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google Senior Fellow, the company's highest technical rank. Dean and Ghemawat are the only two people to have held the title.

Other co-founders include Oriol Vinyals, who worked alongside Dean as technical co-lead of the Gemini models, and Quoc Le, who joined Dean as a founding member of the Google Brain team in 2011.

"The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models," Dean said.

The startup has raised seed funding led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital, in addition to Alphabet. Dean said they plan to hire a founding team over the next few weeks.

"We will start building our infrastructure and AI models and systems to tackle our first domain: automating large-scale experimentation for ML research and engineering," Dean said.