A lab chief hands over daily control while saying AGI feels close at hand

Claim

Demis Hassabis, telling staff that AGI feels close at hand, handed day-to-day control of Google DeepMind to Koray Kavukcuoglu and rose to chair and chief scientist, keeping Isomorphic Labs and his pitch for a self-regulating safety body, with staff calling the exits an earthquake and Google falling over 4%.

Reported metric: -4%

Reporting date: 2026-08-05 (not necessarily the event date)

Sources

Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.

• Welcome to August 5, 2026 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)