Demis Hassabis moves from CEO to chairman at Google DeepMind

A leadership shake-up at Google DeepMind

Demis Hassabis is leaving his role as CEO of Google DeepMind to become the unit's chairman, Axios reported on August 5, 2026. He will also add the title of chief scientist for Alphabet, Google's parent company, and continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, the company's AI drug discovery spinoff.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently chief technology officer of Google DeepMind, will serve as senior vice president of the unit, reporting to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Jeff Dean and colleagues depart

Chief scientist Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran, is leaving with several Google AI colleagues to start Discovery Loop, an independent public benefit corporation. Google will be an investor and a cloud provider for the new company. Joining Dean are Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, DeepMind vice president Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, a Google Brain co-founder.

A company under competitive pressure

The moves are the latest in a series of departures and shifts at Google as frontier AI models have advanced rapidly in recent months and the company struggles to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic. Google's stock fell more than 4% on the news, after rallying 13% from a post-earnings low.

What the memos say

Google put a positive spin on the changes, with Hassabis, Pichai and Kavukcuoglu all sharing upbeat memos. Hassabis wrote that he has been working towards AGI his whole life and feels it is “close at hand,” adding: “I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture.”

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

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