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AI Lately
Live · The Signal · W37
Monday, September 14, 2026
AI Lately

AI is about people, and what they have been up to lately.

Lately
Fidji SimoNscaleas Independent Director· Sep 11Josh EngelsMETRas Researcher· Sep 10Joe BentonMETRas Researcher· Sep 10Alan DuongCrux AIas Chief Development Officer· Sep 10Paul ChristianoOpenAI Foundationas Board Member, Safety and Security Committee· Sep 9Jacob CoxonIndependentas Independent AI Safety Advocate· Sep 8Geoffrey IrvingMathematical AI Safety Instituteas Scientific Advisory Panel Member· Sep 8Paul ChristianoMathematical AI Safety Instituteas Scientific Advisory Panel Member· Sep 8Fidji SimoNscaleas Independent Director· Sep 11Josh EngelsMETRas Researcher· Sep 10Joe BentonMETRas Researcher· Sep 10Alan DuongCrux AIas Chief Development Officer· Sep 10Paul ChristianoOpenAI Foundationas Board Member, Safety and Security Committee· Sep 9Jacob CoxonIndependentas Independent AI Safety Advocate· Sep 8Geoffrey IrvingMathematical AI Safety Instituteas Scientific Advisory Panel Member· Sep 8Paul ChristianoMathematical AI Safety Instituteas Scientific Advisory Panel Member· Sep 8

Person

Varun Mohan

Lately: Google DeepMind as AI Leader, Google DeepMind, from Windsurf.

Public record only: name, role, employer, source, and date.

Recorded moves

  1. Varun Mohan → Google DeepMind as AI Leader, Google DeepMind, from Windsurf (Chief Executive Officer)

    Established the license-and-hire template Google reused twice inside eighteen months to add frontier talent while avoiding a formal acquisition.

    acquihireconfirmedCNBC: Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in $2.4 billion AI talent dealJul 11, 2025

In the archive

  • Opinion

    People Are the Product

    Four hires — Alexandr Wang at Meta, Varun Mohan at Google, Fidji Simo at OpenAI, Krishna Rao at Anthropic — explain company strategy better than any earnings call, and that is AI Lately's method.

  • Hiring & Talent

    The Biggest AI Hires of 2025

    Meta's $14.3 billion Scale AI deal, OpenAI's C-suite rebuild, and Google's Windsurf license turned 2024 and 2025 into a two-year auction for AI's rarest asset: the researchers themselves.

  • Hiring & Talent

    Google DeepMind's Retention Playbook

    A $2.4 billion Windsurf acquihire, Koray Kavukcuoglu's promotion and Demis Hassabis's step-back from chief executive trace how Google answered an exodus that sent Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer toward rivals.

  • Hiring & Talent

    The Compensation Revolution

    Meta's nine-figure packages and a run of license-and-hire deals worth billions, from Microsoft's Inflection buyout to Google's Windsurf pickup, show incumbents paying for entire research teams while structuring around the merger review a straight acquisition would trigger.

  • Capital & Markets

    The Year of the Acqui-Hire

    OpenAI, Google, Meta, Nvidia and Cognition spent a combined tens of billions in 2025 and 2026 buying companies mainly to secure the specific people running them, a pattern regulators are only beginning to name.