Google's new AI chief inherits 2-front race to catch OpenAI, Anthropic

Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over Google DeepMind as the unit races to close a widening gap with OpenAI and Anthropic.

Google's new DeepMind chief inherits a two-front race to close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic, whose latest models have pulled ahead while Google's flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro remains delayed. Kavukcuoglu, promoted from chief technology officer and chief AI architect, reports directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams.

"The goal will undoubtedly be to close the gaps with Anthropic and OpenAI in some areas," Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, said.

Kavukcuoglu replaces Demis Hassabis, who becomes chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug-discovery company. Alphabet shares fell 4% on the announcement, though the stock has climbed about 76% over the past 12 months. Nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies use Gemini Enterprise, Pichai said on the last earnings call, a sign of the commercial stakes behind the leadership change.

A widening gap at the frontier

Google has lagged OpenAI, which set the pace after releasing ChatGPT in 2022. That shifted in November 2025 when Google released Gemini 3, which analysts said "moved the frontier forward." But 2026 has seen Anthropic's Mythos model and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 break new ground, while Google's releases this year — including Gemini 3.1 Pro in February — have not challenged at the frontier.

Google fell behind because its focus was on monetizable areas such as Search and multimodal, and it lost out on the first clear killer use case: coding, said Malik Ahmed Khan, senior equity analyst at Morningstar. Coding is an area where OpenAI and Anthropic are "miles ahead" of Google, he added. Google assembled an internal team called "Code Strike" to bolster coding capabilities, crucial to the drive to develop artificial general intelligence.

A Google spokesperson said it would be inaccurate to say the company was distracted from its mission of solving "intelligence" before solving "everything else," pointing to DeepMind releases across robotics, video and computer use.

Kavukcuoglu's mandate

Kavukcuoglu is part of DeepMind's old guard, having joined in 2012 before the Google acquisition, and has been taking on broader responsibilities from Hassabis over the past year, including directing model development and presenting major Gemini releases. His promotion "shows that Google is prioritizing execution over deep research," said Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research. "Expect faster releases, more experimentation and an emphasis on developing to a product roadmap."

The first step for Kavukcuoglu "would be to ship Gemini 3.5 Pro if possible, and then prove it wasn't a one-off by maintaining a predictable release cadence," said Nick Patience, AI lead at the Futurum Group. Beyond shipping a model that competes at the frontier, Kavukcuoglu "needs to rebuild the coding and pretraining expertise that walked out the door," he said.

The reshuffle comes as Google loses several prominent AI researchers. Jeff Dean, who co-founded Google Brain in 2011, and Sanjay Ghemawat are leaving after 27 years to launch Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on machine learning, science and engineering. Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI in June, and Nobel laureate John Jumper said he would join Anthropic. Google is a founding investor in Discovery Loop and its cloud partner.

The breadth of Kavukcuoglu's remit — Gemini model development, the Gemini app and developer teams, reporting directly to Pichai — could boost Google's AI advantage, said Brian Hopkins, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. "Models, the app, and the developer teams under one executive is how a company organizes a product group rather than a lab," he said. "This is something that Google knows how to do much better than OpenAI or Anthropic."

Alphabet shares, trading up about 76% over the past year, fell 4% on the reshuffle announcement. The Gemini app reached 950 million monthly users, and Gemma models have surpassed 900 million downloads, Pichai said. Whether Kavukcuoglu can restore Google's frontier standing — and reassure investors that Gemini 3.5 Pro will ship — will determine whether the stock's AI premium holds.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.