Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over DeepMind as Demis Hassabis steps back

On August 12, 2026 Google announced that Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s former CTO, is replacing Demis Hassabis as head of the AI unit, with a mandate refocused on the frontier and on code. The move is a deliberate pivot from research toward product execution to catch OpenAI and Anthropic.