Hassabis steps down as Google DeepMind CEO, becomes Alphabet chief scientist

Sundar Pichai announced on 5 August 2026 that Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind. Pichai said Hassabis will become chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs.

Hassabis will shift from day-to-day operations to high-level scientific strategy across Alphabet, including frontier AI and efforts toward artificial general intelligence, according to Google's announcement. He will remain based in DeepMind's London offices, advising its leaders and working with Pichai on strategic and global AGI matters.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind's chief technology officer and Alphabet's chief AI architect, becomes senior vice president of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai. He now oversees Gemini models, frontier research, and the Gemini app and developer teams, taking ownership of Gemini 4.

Google said Gemini has 950 million monthly users and Gemma has been downloaded 900 million times.

The leadership change coincided with departures elsewhere in the unit. Gemini co-leads Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals announced on the same day that they were leaving to found a start-up, joined by Sanjay Ghemawat and Quoc Le, according to The Next Web.

Alphabet shares fell more than 5% following the announcement.

Reports say Hassabis had already been handing Gemini product and consumer decisions to Kavukcuoglu for about a year before the formal change.

The reshuffle comes as Google competes with OpenAI and Anthropic, and puts a single executive in charge of turning DeepMind's research into shipped Gemini models more quickly.