Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis, photographed in July 2025. Image: Christopher Michel (Cmichel67) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped
Google is losing researchers over its military AI work. Several Google DeepMind staff have resigned or are on their way out over the company’s contracts with the US and Israeli militaries, the BBC reported on Wednesday, and two of them have spoken on the record. One, London-based research engineer Sofia Liguori, quit this week and talked to the BBC even though her contract restricts her from doing so.
Liguori, who spent three years at the company, put it plainly:
Realising my company is pushing more and more for AI systems in military operations makes me feel ashamed to work at Google.
Sofia Liguori, former Google DeepMind research engineer, to the BBC
Who is leaving, and why
Liguori told the BBC she resigned over Google’s growing work with the US and Israeli militaries. “I don’t agree with this direction and this has led me to lose faith in my company being true to its stated ethical values,” she said.
Andreas Kirsch, an AI researcher, left Google DeepMind earlier this month. He told the BBC that Google’s governance and oversight are “not sufficient or meaningful enough to deploy AI safely and responsibly in military and classified settings”, or “to develop artificial superintelligence safely in the future”. His sharpest point was about control:
Google seems to have no right to control or veto how the Pentagon uses its AI and also seems to have limited visibility into how it’s being deployed.
Andreas Kirsch, former Google DeepMind researcher, to the BBC
Two current DeepMind employees, speaking anonymously, told the BBC that “a lot of people have left the company that feel strongly about this”. They are not the first to walk out of DeepMind on principle this autumn: in September engineer Robert O’Callahan quit because his team was making AI faster.
What Google signed
Google is one of several companies that signed deals with the US military this year to put their AI into classified settings. According to the BBC, Google’s agreement lets its models be used for “any lawful government purpose” and says they “should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons (including target selection) without appropriate human oversight and control”. OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Oracle, Nvidia and the start-up Reflection signed similar contracts.
The push comes from the top. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said in January that the US will become an “AI-first warfighting force”, and the Pentagon has since set up a command for autonomous warfare and gone shopping for AI agents that hack on their own. Anthropic’s Claude was dropped from Palantir’s Maven Smart System, the Pentagon’s main targeting platform, after Anthropic refused to lift its limits on military use.
Google’s AI Principles promise “appropriate human oversight” and alignment with “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights”. They used to go further. The 2018 version listed AI “we will not pursue”, including weapons and surveillance that breaks international norms; Google dropped that list when it rewrote the principles in February 2025, in a post co-written by DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis.
“You feel you are being watched”
Staff told the BBC they are afraid to speak out because their contracts forbid public criticism. “In principle I’m not allowed to criticise Google for the duration of my life,” Liguori said, adding that “talking about facts is not criticising”. Inside the company, she said, “people are scared of retaliation and putting their career at risk.”
Google defended its process. A spokesperson told the BBC: “We work with public sector organisations worldwide and follow a consistent process for reviewing and entering these contracts, including compliance with our acceptable use policies and AI principles.” It added that it has “strict workplace policies in place to prevent retaliation of any kind.”
An echo of Project Maven
Google has been here before. In 2018 thousands of its employees protested its work on the original Project Maven, a Pentagon effort to analyse drone footage with AI; some resigned, Google let the contract lapse, and it published those first AI principles. Its $1.2bn Project Nimbus cloud deal with Israel, shared with Amazon, drew staff protests in 2024. Jack Shanahan, the retired lieutenant general who led Project Maven, told the BBC the philosophy now seems to be to “go as fast as possible to deploy [AI technology] as widely as possible, potentially at the expense of the rigour and discipline of test and evaluation.”
Why it matters
In 2018, staff pressure pulled Google out of military AI; this time the company is staying in and the dissenters are leaving. If the people most worried about how DeepMind’s models are used keep walking out, fewer voices inside the lab will be left to push back, just as those models move into classified war planning.
Sources: BBC News (interviews with Sofia Liguori and Andreas Kirsch, Google statement); Google AI Principles; Google, “Responsible AI: Our 2024 report and ongoing work” (February 2025); Google, “AI at Google: our principles” (2018).
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