In 2018, Google erased its public commitment to not develop AI tools for use as weaponry or mass surveillance purposes. It then fired the leaders of it’s internal AI ethics team who had been charged with reviewing and maintaining these moral boundaries.
In May of this year the company signed a massive classified contract with the US War Department that permits use of its AI products for any “lawful government use”. Anthropic and OpenAI, Google’s competitors, refused to sign a similar deal based on moral grounds.
Now 98 per cent of Google DeepMind’s UK-based workers have voted to unionise, not to improve wages or working conditions – but on moral grounds. The union’s demands go far beyond the typical scope of collective bargaining. They are calling for:
- An immediate end to the use of Google AI by the U.S. and Israeli militaries.
- The restoration of the company’s commitment to avoid building weapons or surveillance tools.
- The creation of an independent ethics oversight body.
- The right for individual researchers to refuse work on projects for moral reasons.
This unionization represents a desperate last stand for researchers who feel that internal review processes have been “overridden when they conflicted with revenue”. While the Pentagon deal grants the military access to AI models on air-gapped networks—making independent verification of safety guardrails nearly impossible—the workers are leveraging their status as some of the industry’s most valuable assets to force a change in corporate strategy.
Ultimately, this is more than a labor dispute; it is a fundamental question of who has the right to constrain the application of the world’s most powerful technology: the companies and governments that fund it, or the researchers who create it? By moving from individual protest to collective bargaining, DeepMind’s workers are betting that Google values its talent more than its military contracts.
And all this is being decided behind closed doors folks. Spread the word!
For further learning check out this great Guardian article on this topic which was my source for this posting.
