Google's bad week
According to CNBC, Alphabet, Google's parent company, just experienced its "worst day" on June 22, when its stock price fell more than 5% - the sharpest one-day drop recorded since 7% in May 2025.
This comes after two prominent researchers left last week. On June 17, Noam Shazeer, Google's Vice President of Engineering and co-leader of the Gemini AI model development team, announced his resignation to join OpenAI.
Shazeer quit less than two years after returning to Google. In August 2024, the company invited him and researcher Daniel De Freitas back to DeepMind. Previously, he was a Google employee, but resigned and founded the startup Character.AI.
Experts evaluate Noam Shazeer's decision as quite surprising because he was facilitated by Google to develop AI, and is the key person behind Gemini 3.5 Flash and AI agent Gemini Spark - two new AIs introduced at Google I/O 2026 at the end of May.
On June 19, Google continued to receive bad news, when John Jumper, DeepMind's Vice President and senior engineer, announced that he was leaving the company after 9 years to join rival Anthropic. He won the Nobel Prize with Demis Hassabis in 2024, famous for being the co-creator of AlphaFold - a groundbreaking model that has predicted more than 200 million protein structures, helping shorten years of biological and medical research.
"Google's two senior AI leaders leaving together raises concerns that the company is losing the war for talent in the field of artificial intelligence," Gil Luria, head of technology research at investment finance company DA Davidson, told Blooomberg. "Last year, Google announced the most advanced model and was considered a winner in the field of AI. But since then they have fallen behind, and these two departures could mean they continue to be left behind."
Some other experts rated Google as having the "worst week of the year" when it let two big names join OpenAI and Anthropic. "OpenAI and Anthropic are increasingly dominating in the US thanks to their superior AI model compared to Google, Meta or xAI," Adam Crisafulli, founder of the Vital Knowledge newsletter, commented on June 21, after John Jumper quit.
Google stock price decline also occurred after WSJ's interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted on June 21. In it, he called for less dependence on "AI giants", saying that the AI market "has become popular". A few days earlier, he also warned that AI could "hollow out" industries.
Bao Lam compiled