Industry 2026-08-10

'Just another subdivision': what Google did to DeepMind in the week after Hassabis stepped aside

Five days after Demis Hassabis gave up the chief executive title, the shape of the change is clearer, and it is larger than a leadership swap. DeepMind no longer has a chief executive at all: Koray Kavukcuoglu runs the lab as a senior vice president reporting to Sundar Pichai, a rung lower than the seat Hassabis held. DeepMind's communications, legal and marketing teams have been folded into Google's. Gemini work is being pulled toward the Bay Area — the Telegraph reported that Google's AI leadership is now expected to sit in Mountain View, that Sebastian Borgeaud has already moved from London to the United States, and that other senior British researchers have left the company outright; a London coding team is reported to be relocating to Mountain View too. Sergey Brin is taking a larger hand. The Guardian, whose reporting was picked up on Sunday, quoted a former Google manager saying the era of DeepMind as an independent actor is over and a current employee calling the lab 'just another subdivision'. Hassabis stays on as chairman of the unit and chief scientist of Alphabet, and continues to run the drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs; he is reported to have wanted to leave alongside chief scientist Jeff Dean and to have been kept on to steady the share price, with a full exit possible in the coming months. Alphabet stock fell 5.5 per cent on the announcement.

Why it mattersDeepMind's independence was not sentimental — it was the arrangement that let a research lab in London set its own agenda inside an advertising company, and it produced AlphaFold, AlphaGo and the Nobel Prize that came with the first of those. What is being dismantled is that arrangement. The trade is deliberate and it is about speed: Gemini has slipped behind OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier, and a lab that answers to product deadlines in Mountain View ships faster than one that answers to a research agenda in King's Cross. Whether it discovers as much is the open question, and nobody will be able to answer it for years. For Britain there is a smaller, sharper version of the same story. The single most prestigious AI institution in the country is becoming a satellite office, and the people it attracted are moving west or leaving. That is worth watching for anyone in Europe who assumed that hosting a world-class lab was a durable position rather than a temporary one.

✓ Verified · 3 sources

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'Just another subdivision': what Google did to DeepMind in the week after Hassabis stepped aside

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