Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over in frontier AI push

DeepMind’s new boss is set to face intense pressure to close the AI performance gap with OpenAI and Anthropic.

OpenAI and Anthropic have released new systems in recent months that have been both hailed for and prompted concern over their advanced capabilities. On the other hand, Google, which acquired DeepMind in 2014, hasn’t unveiled a frontier model since early 2026.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, who was previously the AI unit’s CTO and parent company Google’s chief AI architect, is inheriting a race to catch up to OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier — building the industry’s most advanced models. He’s stepping up to become SVP, replacing DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis, who becomes the organization’s chair.

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

Kavukcuoglu’s promotion “feels like a move that is designed to adjust the focus of Google’s efforts away from academic projects and more toward a stronger focus on improving frontier performance and improving the toolset for developers,” Wood added.

Google has lagged behind OpenAI, which set the pace after releasing ChatGPT to the public in 2022. That shifted in November 2025 when Google released Gemini 3.

Analysts said the model “moved the frontier forward”, with capabilities that “far exceed[ed] what we’ve typically come to expect from this generation of frontier models.”

But 2026 has seen OpenAI and Claude maker Anthropic pull ahead with new releases. Anthropic’s Mythos model broke new ground, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 was similarly lauded.

Following Gemini 3.1 Pro in February, Google’s releases this year haven’t challenged at the frontier. It assembled an internal team called “Code Strike” to bolster coding capabilities, crucial to the drive to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Google fell behind Anthropic and OpenAI “because its focus was much more on monetizable areas such as Search, and multi-modal and it lost out on the first clear killer use case, which is coding,” Malik Ahmed Khan, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNBC. Coding is an area where those two companies are “miles ahead” of Google, he added.

A Google spokesperson told CNBC it would be inaccurate to say the company was distracted from its mission of solving “intelligence” before solving “everything else.” They said the path to AGI will involve pushing on fronts including agents, coding, robotics and world models, and pointed to DeepMind releases across robotics, video and computer use, as well as public policy work and research.

Kavukcuoglu is part of DeepMind’s old guard, having joined in 2012 before the Google acquisition, and will look to bring renewed focus on challenging Anthropic and OpenAI at the frontier, amid several high-profile departures.

Reporting directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams, Pichai said in a statement.

Kavukcuoglu’s appointment will bring “more focus to GDM, with LLM [large language model] improvements being the clear route forward,” Morningstar’s Khan said. “We think Google is likely better positioned in the LLM race with these changes than it was without them,” he added.

“Demis has been much more interested in building AGI that was beyond LLMs,” Khan said.

Hassabis’ tenure leading DeepMind “saw a clear focus on other areas such as multi-modal, such as world models, as well as his work in health, for example with Isomorphic Labs,” he added.

Kavukcuoglu had been taking on broader responsibilities from Hassabis over the past year, including directing model development and presenting major Gemini releases, a person close to the DeepMind team told CNBC last week.

Kavukcuoglu’s promotion “shows that Google is prioritizing execution over deep research,” Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, told CNBC. “Expect faster releases, more experimentation and an emphasis on developing to a product roadmap.”

Alphabet shares sank in July after Bloomberg reported that the company had delayed the release of Gemini 3.5 Pro to try and improve performance in areas like coding.

“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 told CNBC.

DeepMind was based in London before its acquisition and Hassabis remained in the city as CEO when it became a division within Google. DeepMind’s continued presence there spurred the U.K. AI ecosystem.

Under his previous role, Kavukcuoglu moved from London to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

“Google is quietly consolidating its AI leadership out of London,” Patience said. A Google spokesperson told CNBC it remained committed to its presence in the UK capital.

Alphabet shares dropped on Thursday when the AI reshuffle was announced, though the stock has risen around 76% in the last 12 months.

Alphabet CEO Pichai said on last month’s earnings call that nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies are using Gemini Enterprise, stressing the company’s ability to sell AI services to cloud customers.

“Although the model is behind and they want to catch up and they take that seriously, the monetization of the model is doing extremely well,” Sebastian Mallaby, author of “The Infinity Machine,” a biography of Hassabis, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday. He pointed to Google’s AI being deployed across Android phones and Siri and Apple Intelligence on iPhones.

It was wrong to “paint a picture of a general crisis” at the company because of big-name departures, Mallaby added. “It’s a big team. It’s several thousand people on the Gemini team, if you count everybody. And so we shouldn’t over-index on a few famous names.”

The breadth of Kavukcuoglu’s remit — Gemini model development, the Gemini app and developer teams, and reporting directly to Sundar Pichai — could also boost Google’s AI advantage, said Brian Hopkins, VP, emerging tech 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 told CNBC. “This is something that Google knows how to do much better than OpenAI or Anthropic.”

— CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos contributed to this report.