DeepMind loses sole non-US executive overseeing AI development as Hassabis steps back

Google’s DeepMind will lose its sole non-US executive overseeing day-to-day AI development, as co-founder Demis Hassabis steps back from daily operations on August 5, 2026. Hassabis, based in London, will remain chair of DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet, but operational control shifts to Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently DeepMind’s CTO, who will become senior vice-president reporting directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. The change also coincides with the departure of engineer Jeff Dean, along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, as they launch an independent AI startup called Discover Loop. Google plans to back the venture with investment and a cloud partnership; Alphabet shares reportedly fell about 4% after the announcement.