Google was just added to the Dow Jones On the same day it lost $250 billion in market value and two of its key AI researchers.

It was rather strange timing. S&P Dow Jones Indices said in a statement on Monday that it had chosen Alphabet shares to replace Verizon Communications Inc in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, starting June 29. The type of his milestone that typically prompts press release statements and Instagram posts from the CEO congratulating the employees.

The announcement, in fact, came the same day that Google saw a 6% decline in stock price, its worst single session for about a year and resulting in an almost $250 billion drop in market cap.

What the index committee did was to honour what Google has built in two decades of work. That could have been read as that the market was pricing what it may well be losing currently.

Two exits that stung

It had two immediate triggers to that selloff, in both cases people rather than products.

One of the core architects behind Gemini AI model has said Noam Shazeer, is leaving Google to join OpenAI. He was only back at Google as of August 2024 due to the $2.7 billion partnership with Character, a rival who no longer desired to share profits with Google. AI which he created after initially leaving Google in 2021. It was always meant for him to strengthen DeepMind. However, he did not even last two years before moving to a direct rival.

And then Friday, just before the markets opened Monday, came John Jumper saying he was leaving DeepMind for Anthropic after nine years. Jumper is no ordinary researcher. Most recently he worked on AlphaFold, the system that mapped over 200 million protein structures and revolutionized biology and drug discovery. That work eventually earned him a Nobel Prize in 2024, alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. He is the type of person that you build a scientific reputation as the company around.

Two departures in five days. One to OpenAI. One to Anthropic. Both from the same division that Google touted as the crown jewel of its AI ambitions.

Why this hit so hard

Google is spending at a truly mind-bending scale. Alphabet originally borrowed $141 billion, then halted since October. Its 2026 capital expenditure guidance stands between $180 billion and $190 billion, more than double the previous year, with additional growth scheduled for 2027. Pretty much all of it is going to AI data centers and training models.

Such expenditure only makes sense when the talent layered on top sticks around. When Shazeer and Jumper level researchers walk out, investors ask if the money is creating a moat or merely erecting a monument.

As D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria expressed it straightforwardly: "Demand is so strong for scarce AI research talent that the frontier AI research labs will go to any length to acquire them.”

And this is why OpenAI and Anthropic have a competitive edge above larger firms like Google, in that they can offer less bureaucracy and (what they hope will be) a more concentrated effort to pursue Superintelligence.

That observation sits alongside a competitive picture that has shifted meaningfully in 2026. Gemini 3.5 Flash and Gemini 3.1 Pro have slipped outside the top five on several major AI benchmark rankings, with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Zhipu AI, and MiniMax ranking ahead in certain evaluations.

Google said at its I/O conference in May that Gemini 3.5 Pro was coming in June, roughly four months after the 3.1 release. In that same window, Anthropic shipped two major Claude Opus updates and introduced Mythos, a new model class built for extended autonomous tasks.

The Dow addition in context

There is a truly compelling case to be made for including Alphabet in the Dow. Together, Google Search, YouTube, Google Cloud, Android and Waymo and DeepMind's healthcare projects constitute probably even more a slice of the modern American economy than Verizon's mobile network did back in the day. And in the Dow's price-weighted structure of allocating index weight, Verizon had fallen to about 0.5% of the overall index, virtually invisible. This higher share price gives Alphabet a natural edge in that equation.

Shares of Alphabet (which owns Google) are more than 10% higher in 2026, despite a 6% sell-off on Monday. That will mark the company's fourth straight year of gains. The business is not broken.

What the market is digesting is a much more difficult to define. The question is not whether Google can afford to replace the most talented people that built its core products, but rather when those researchers are leaving for your competition. Will you be able to provide what they were aware of in place.

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