The Financial Times reported on 29 July that Google DeepMind's dedicated AlphaFold team no longer exists as a unit. Its members have been reassigned over roughly the past year to Gemini-centred projects, enzyme design, nuclear fusion, genomics and to Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's drug-discovery spinout.
DeepMind is not denying it
Research vice-president Pushmeet Kohli spoke on the record: "Our strategy over the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges… a concrete goal every project is focused on. The strategy has evolved." A spokesperson added that many AlphaFold researchers "continue today to drive scientific and technological advances across Google, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs." This is confirmation, reframed.
What is not happening
AlphaFold has not been shut down. The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, with more than 200 million predicted structures, remains live, as do AlphaFold Server and AlphaFold 3 for academic use. Engadget originally published a headline saying Google had shut the project down and corrected it the following morning. Nobody was laid off — this is internal reassignment plus voluntary departures.
The departures are older than the story
John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work, announced his exit on 19 June after about nine years. Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel followed within days. Both were working on Gemini-adjacent projects — coding and pretraining — rather than AlphaFold when they left. The FT reports that nearly a quarter of the original papers' DeepMind authors have now left the company entirely, though DeepMind has never disclosed the team's size.
Sourcing
Every open account traces back to the FT. There is no independent confirmation of the characterisation — only Kohli's on-record statement that the strategy changed.