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Google Deepmind’s staff in the UK is seeking to join in an effort to challenge the company’s decision to sell its artificial intelligence technologies to the protection groups and links with the Israeli government.
About 300 London -based employees of that technology giant, led by British Nobel Laureate Sir Demis Hassabis, have sought to join the communication workers’ union in recent weeks, according to three people informed about the action.
The effort creates a new strain in Deepmind which is being pushed by its corporate parent to find trade uses for its powerful, Hassabis, recently suggesting that companies in democratic countries have to work together to support national security.
The measure to join follows the growing dissatisfaction in the company after Google rejected a February promise not to develop technology that “cause or are likely to cause overall damage”, including weapons and supervision.
Three people involved in Drive Unionisation said media reports that Google is selling its cloud services and the technology of it at the Israeli Ministry of Defense has also caused concern. The Israeli government has a Cloud computing agreement of $ 1.2 billion with Google and Amazon, called Project Nimbus.
Further tension was caused by media reports that Israeli defense forces used systems to generate targets for assassinations and attacks on the Gaza Strip, although it is unclear whether the IDF is using commercially purchased software for those purposes, or building its own. IDF did not respond to a comment request.
“We are joining two and two and we think that the technology we are developing is being used in conflict (in Gaza),” said one engineer involved in the effort of the Union. “This is essentially the front we are offering a constant conflict. People don’t want their work to be used like this.”
“People feel deceived,” the person added.
According to the correspondence seen by FT, five deep staff have left over the past two months, citing the Informatics Agreement in Israel Cloud and turning Google to existing its use. In the US, Google fired some staff for organizing protests seated in connection with the Nimbus project.
In May 2024, Deepmind’s staff sent a letter to the company’s leadership calling for her to abolish her military contracts and hold several meetings with management, but their requests have been rejected.
Attempting to organize will now have to be recognized by the company, through a vote between Deepmind employees in the UK. The unit of it has about 2,000 staff in the UK.
A Google spokesman said: “Our approach is and has always been to develop and decide responsibly. We encourage constructive and open dialogue with all our employees. In the United Kingdom and around the world, Googlers have long been part of the representative groups of employees, counsel and union.”
The company said it still coincides with its principles of responsible development, but that the landscape has changed significantly since its 2018 promise against weapons and supervision of it.
The union remains relatively rare in the entire technology sector, which has long resisted efforts to organize its labor force. But there has been increasing activity in recent years, including in Amazon and Apple. Google employees founded the Alphabet Workers’ Union in the SH.BA in 2021.
One person said that if the Union acquires recognition from Deepmind, it will seek to fulfill management to demand that the company change the course for defense agreements and, if unsuccessful, consider the strike action. They said colleagues in the US were also in discussions about the Union.
“What I hope and what people who are active hope for is for us to stay away from any military contract,” they added.
Google has faced similar protests for its military links before. In 2018, some employees left and thousands of employees signed a petition in protest against Project Maven, a contract for the US military that used the technology to improve drone strikes. After widespread staff dissatisfaction, Google did not renew his contract with the Pentagon and pledged not to work on the technologies of him for weapons or supervision.
A senior figure in the CWU union who is not a deep employee said that when the company was first founded “attracted many smart people who wanted to work for things for good good”, but Google had started “tracking military money”. Google bought the company in 2014.
They noticed that the staff in Deepmind is often high salaries. “They are not joining the union for salary negotiations. They have joined because they have seen the benefits of collectivization to keep Google to account for their declared ethics,” they said.
The Deepmind engineer who has joined CWU and is involved in organizing unhappy staff, said “joining a union is probably the most crazy thing many of the deepminders would have ever thought they would do” but “the level of people’s concern has grown slowly in recent years”.
The company is “sacrificing morality for greed,” the employee added.
