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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…