Power Shifts West as London Lab Frays
On Wednesday evening in London, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis delivered a message to employees: Hassabis was relinquishing the CEO title and moving to a chairman role. Minutes later, the news broke that chief scientist Jeff Dean and several other prominent researchers were also leaving the company.
Staff in DeepMind's London office were, by one engineer's account, 'very mixed' on what the reshuffle meant. Some wondered whether the chairman role would ultimately end with Hassabis phased entirely out of the company.
A lab under pressure before the announcement
The leadership shake-up was not the beginning of the trouble — it was the visible surface of it. Three current and one former DeepMind employee told Fortune that tensions had been simmering for months. The most concrete symptom: the company's Gemini 3.5 Pro model has missed three release deadlines in recent months. Three DeepMind engineers blamed those delays on the company failing to prioritize AI coding abilities.
Prominent London-based researchers — including AlphaFold veterans John Jumper, Jonas Adler, and Alexander Pritzel — have already left to join Anthropic. The lab has also faced a public dispute with its own staff over defense contracts.
The structural read
Rather than naming a new CEO for DeepMind, Pichai announced that chief technology officer Koray Kavukcuoglu would take over day-to-day operations as senior vice president, reporting directly to Pichai rather than holding a standalone DeepMind CEO title. Kavukcuoglu is based in Mountain View, California — roughly 6,000 miles from DeepMind's London home.
Three DeepMind engineers told Fortune the arrangement represents a broader structural change: a shifting of power to Mountain View and away from London, where DeepMind was originally founded. One engineer called it 'a small step, but gradually continuing the trend,' adding that 'a lot of people are quite upset by it — both Demis exiting, and losing some of the separation from Alphabet and identity as DeepMind.'
A Google spokesperson disputed the characterization that power was shifting to Mountain View, saying DeepMind would retain separate leadership and research autonomy under Kavukcuoglu, and that Hassabis along with much of DeepMind's leadership would remain based in London. In his note to staff, Hassabis said he was handing over day-to-day responsibilities to gain 'time and space to focus on the big picture.'
The competitive cost
Once a frontrunner, Google DeepMind has ceded ground to OpenAI and Anthropic. For the second time in four years, the company is playing catch-up.
CEO Times take: The numbers — three missed deadlines, a string of senior exits, a 6,000-mile power transfer — tell a story that no spokesperson language can fully paper over. When a lab loses its founding CEO, its chief scientist, and a cohort of its most decorated researchers inside the same cycle, the market notices. Capital rewards clear rules and consistent execution; it punishes organizational drift. Google built a genuine scientific crown jewel in DeepMind. Whether absorbing it further into the Mountain View bureaucracy restores momentum or accelerates the talent bleed is the central question for Alphabet shareholders — and for anyone watching the AI race from the outside.
