Demis Hassabis steps down as Google DeepMind CEO in leadership reshuffle

Demis Hassabis moved from chief executive of Google DeepMind to become the unit’s chairman and chief scientist for Alphabet as a whole, while continuing to lead the pharmaceutical AI spin-off Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu was named senior vice president for DeepMind, reporting directly to Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai and taking direct responsibility for Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams.

The reshuffle coincided with a separate and more abrupt departure: Google senior fellow Jeff Dean and fellow senior engineer Sanjay Ghemawat left the company to found an independent public-benefit corporation, Discovery Loop, aimed at building AI systems that can improve themselves with little or no human feedback. DeepMind vice president Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le were reported to be joining them. Dean and Ghemawat had been Google’s most senior technical leaders for two decades, predating both the DeepMind and Brain units they later helped run.

Google’s share price fell nearly 4% following the announcement. Coverage tied the move to Google’s flagship Gemini model having slipped past a planned mid-2026 launch window, though neither Google nor DeepMind gave a single reason for the changes, and the two departures — Hassabis’s shift within the company and Dean’s exit to a new venture — were reported as related but distinct events.

The changes marked the most significant leadership shift at Google’s AI division since the 2023 merger of DeepMind and Google Brain, moving day-to-day control of Gemini to Kavukcuoglu at a moment when Google faced sharper competitive pressure from OpenAI and Anthropic on model releases, and raised the prospect of a new, independently funded lab pursuing self-improving AI systems outside any of the existing frontier labs.