# Google delays Gemini 3.5 Pro general availability to July 2026 as four senior AI researchers including Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer and Nobel laureate John Jumper depart for OpenAI and Anthropic

_Thursday, July 2, 2026 at 5:08 PM EDT · AI · Latest · Tier 2 — Notable_

![Google delays Gemini 3.5 Pro general availability to July 2026 as four senior AI researchers including Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer and Nobel laureate John Jumper depart for OpenAI and Anthropic — Primary](https://startupfortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/sf-14488-1782353143135.jpg)

Google has delayed the general availability of Gemini 3.5 Pro from June to July 2026, citing quality refinements after early enterprise testing, according to Startup Fortune. The frontier model was previewed at Google I/O in May. The delay comes as four senior AI researchers have left the company. Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering working on Gemini and co-author of the 2017 Attention Is All You Need paper that introduced the transformer architecture, is departing for OpenAI. John Jumper, the Google DeepMind scientist who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold, has said he is leaving for Anthropic. The departures were first reported by Business Insider. The Wall Street Journal reported that Alphabet shares fell 5% on June 22, erasing about $225 billion in market value after investors absorbed the news. Google paid $2.7 billion in 2024 to license Character.AI technology and bring Shazeer back to the company, according to Axios and other outlets. His departure less than two years later has drawn attention to the broader talent retention challenges at Google's AI division.

## Sources

- [Startup Fortune](https://startupfortune.com/google-delays-gemini-35-pro-to-july-as-talent-exodus-deepens-the-pressure-on-its-ai-ambitions/)

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