Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of Google’s artificial intelligence division DeepMind, is stepping aside to a more advisory role, Google announced on Wednesday. Hassabis will become DeepMind’s chair, and take a new role as chief scientist at Google parent Alphabet. 

The move comes alongside a broader restructuring of Google DeepMind, according to multiple people familiar with the changes, as Google attempts to catch up to industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic.

In a note to staff, Hassabis said he believed that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is “close at hand” and said he had decided to switch roles “so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability.” 

Although the news shocked the AI industry, some DeepMind employees suggested it made sense. Hassabis had spent less time on Gemini, Google’s struggling frontier AI model, in recent months, according to two people with knowledge of his focus, and was spending more time on questions of safety and what the arrival of AGI would mean for society.

Other changes are accompanying his move. Lila Ibrahim, DeepMind’s Chief AI Readiness Officer, will now report to James Manyika, a senior Google executive, according to four people with knowledge of the personnel changes. Some of the teams that previously reported to her, including some safety teams, will now report to Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, one of these people said, though two others warned that no decision has yet been finalized. 

One DeepMind employee told TIME they were worried that if teams focused on safety, responsibility and ethics were moved from DeepMind into Google, they may lose their influence. 

"To be clear, in terms of frontier AI safety, this transition changes absolutely nothing," a Google spokesperson said in a statement to TIME.

Comms, legal and marketing teams from DeepMind will merge with those within Google, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Shane Legg, a DeepMind cofounder and its chief AGI scientist, will continue reporting to Hassabis, along with a wider team, according to the same person. (Google did not provide comment for this article by the time of publication.)

Hassabis’ departure comes at a time when Gemini has faced repeated delays, and fallen behind models from OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier. Google is also losing top talent at a rapid pace. On Wednesday its longtime chief scientist Jeff Dean announced he was leaving with several colleagues to launch a startup. John Jumper, a scientist who shared a Nobel Prize with Hassabis for AI protein structure prediction, left DeepMind earlier this year to join Anthropic, among other high-profile departures.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technology officer, will replace Hassabis at the helm of DeepMind, though in a senior vice president position rather than as CEO, Google boss Sundar Pichai wrote in a memo on Wednesday. 

Kavukcuoglu had been taking responsibility for the development of Gemini long before Wednesday’s news. In company briefings, Kavukcuoglu would lead Gemini discussions, and Hassabis had been absent from many day-to-day meetings about Gemini, attending only for the most significant ones, one DeepMind employee tells TIME. Meanwhile, Hassabis was regularly present for meetings about post-AGI readiness, safety, and AI governance, the person said, and was spending more of his time working with governments, including attending the recent G7 summit.

"Koray’s philosophy has always been clear: advancing the frontier of AI and building it responsibly are the exact same mission," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. "Frontier model safety has lived directly within the Gemini team from the very beginning, under Koray’s leadership. His teams collaborate closely with the safety and policy teams across Google and Google DeepMind, and that will continue."

Semafor earlier reported that Hassabis had been shifting day-to-day responsibility for Gemini and Google’s consumer AI strategy to Kavukcuoglu for at least a year. Hassabis was not pushed to change roles, the outlet reported, but had struggled to gain satisfaction from a role more focused on business than his main passion, science.