Why I Left Google DeepMind

Nothing but respect to TurnTrout for taking an action like this. The world needs more smart people who are willing to stand for what they feel is right, despite the pressures otherwise. Without that occurring more, our species is going to lose many impactful prisoner's dilemmas coming these next two decades.

This raises my respect for AI researchers a little bit too. I have often felt that the entire industry is pretty tainted to the core, and for better or worse that colors my opinion of the researchers.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I thought it was gross to download pirated art for a student project when I was at Berkeley years ago. So it has been really sad to witness many of the most brilliant minds of this generation answering the siren song of disrespecting the collective effort of others to extract and resell residual value.

I'd guess TurnTrout doesn't agree on that framing, otherwise he probably would not have been at Deep Mind. But clearly he and I agree on other ethical positions; I am nothing but glad to see him stick to his principles here.

Props to the author. I left Microsoft due to their work with Israel to spy on Palestinians and record all of their phone conversations (in addition to other IDF collaborations). They ended up walking some of it back, but Satya was complicit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/25/microsoft-bloc...

Principled people have become so rare

Respect for sticking to your beliefs. Just out of curiosity though why do people not want smart AI weapons? I would much rather have an onboard AI that can discriminate between unarmed civilians and military assets, seems irresponsible to not... Is a dumb sea mine that blows up everything somehow better than a smart sea mine that knows to not blow up sometimes?

I did not know about TurnTrout till now and thanks to HN community now I know. I am beyond impressed as to how he lives by his principles. I don't think I have this kind of courgae or confidence and thankfully I don't work for Google or have to quit it. On the other hand we have smart people who have choose to work for companies like Palantir and are proud of it.

I haven't finished reading, but I should note for the group that the author doesn't represent the Anthropic situation accurately. Emil Michael, the undersecretary of war/defense for research and engineering went on the All-In podcast (1) and explained, for quite some time, exactly what happened. You should go listen to it (2). In essence, in the negotiations, Dario kept coming back saying "well, if you need it, call us, we can redline things as needed". This happened over and over and over. Emil's point was that a major conflict, if it were to occur, might happen on the 30 minute clock of an ICBM, and all due respect to Dario, the national security apparatus just doesn't have an allowance in that 30 minutes to call him for a redline. Emil felt Dario had demonstrated he wanted ultimate control via line item veto, and was willing to trade up to and including the survival of the nation for that veto. And a government cannot be expected to pay for that sort of behavior from an entity domiciled in their jurisdiction.

Now, Dario is going to win a decent slice of the economic pie. But as an military acquisitions matter, I gotta say, I have to agree with the undersecretary's position here, and yeah, it makes sense to document a company's undesirable behavior, and in certain circumstances push that information to others. Not the first time the government has found a company under contract acting in a way that appears to be counterproductive to the government's obligations; there's a whole database full of this stuff (3).

1) Without a doubt, All In is a friendly crowd for Emil, but I think that actually made it easier for him to get more nuanced facts out in this case because he wasn't spending a lot of time defending malignant attacks.

2) This link should jump to the relevant segment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzwRflcLPAA&t=2479

3) http://www.ppirs.gov/

This is inspiring, thank you to the author, it must have a hard piece to write.

This is no longer on the front page of HN despite 200+ points and having been posted 1 hour ago.

Well done, great effort! Unfortunately, most people are weak in their comfort.

We know now that Google is a sycophantic company whose DEI initiatives were all fake and dropped once Trump got elected.

This somewhat naive initiative was bound to fail. The good news is that the AI military products won't work, except perhaps for blowing up a girls' school.

Here are CEOs falling over themselves to support Hassabis' regulatory capture proposal:

https://xcancel.com/sundarpichai/status/2077086951833063580#...

https://xcancel.com/satyanadella/status/2077063479232795024#...

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2077415601610297535#m

It is an exclusive club and we are not part of it.

> Plus, a pledge is only worth the credibility behind it. When someone signs “I will not support the development of lethal autonomous weapons,” then stays while their company sells unrestricted AI to a military that wants exactly that, they teach every counterparty a lesson: these safety people will not act, even at their own brightest line. The next commitment they make is worth less. Eventually it’s worth nothing.

This is why I haven’t taken the internally employed (and visibly public) AI safety people seriously for years: they always back down, because they value that fat paycheck and fiscal rewards and associated status over their proclaimed ethical values, red lines, and boundaries. Their actions betray their every word.

That’s also why I push that we remember these names, the ones who fought back as well as those who lied through their teeth. We should remember everyone willing to harm others to protect themselves, and hold them accountable for their misdeeds. In an ideal world, people like Jeff and Sundar and Stuart would be blackballed so hard they’d never be able to get so much as a help desk job ever again, nevermind any position of leadership. It’s why I proclaim them to be monsters, giddily sacrificing the anonymous other for personal vainglory and the avoidance of standing on any sort of principle.

The OP did everything right and demonstrably proved the entire apparatus is rotten to its very core, to the point of infesting and poisoning the very entities professing to stop its worst excesses (IASEAI). Why we give these ghouls the slightest bit of credibility anymore is beyond me.

If the author were to read these comments, I'd commiserate with them on the disappointment of the utopia left behind in the service of acquiring wealth and power. An abundant solarpunk future enabled and augmented by AI, hyped so well by early Google and Kurzweil, captured as capital to earn a buck for shareholders.

Mad props for pushing as far as they could push.

> Even if Google had adopted your Framework, the Pentagon would have refused

> I agree. xAI would still have given over their AI. But if Google had given signs of independence earlier, it could perhaps have built a coalition with OpenAI and Anthropic.

This is like saying that Google and Apple might build a coalition to prevent App Store regulation. These are competitors, they all see moral flexibility as an advantage. They're not going to take a moralist stance if their federal protection is predicated on federal cooperation. All of these FAANG businesses have already bent the knee in anticipation of this, xAI is just riding the coattails of the federal quid-pro-quo.

When you go to work at a megacorp, you're always leaving your ethics at the door. Yes, there's an attractive pie-in-the-sky fantasy that Apple does care about human rights, or that Google isn't evil, but they're always just lies. I disagree with a lot of GCP's customers, but I'm still shocked that a DeepMind employee would make it this far in the career pipeline before seeing the soylent green get made.

I think a man who makes that kind of choice is seriously admirable. I could never have made that choice myself.

am I the only one that finds it very hard to read this font?

> I wanted AI ethics commitments to hold under pressure.

LLM chatbots, they way they are trained and have data collected for them today, are fundamentally unethical, regardless of whether Google sells services to the DHS.

No less importantly, Google's is a fundamentally unethical entity. After all, it says so right in its motto: "Do Evil".

Ok, that's not it's motto, it's just a pun on the old motto Google dropped when it became too starkly opposed to its practices, of mass surveillance and manipulation and censorship of search and content discovery results for commercial and political purposes, on its behalf and that of governments. This has been widely reported upon.

I will just give a few links regarding Google's complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as described by the UN special rapporteur for the Palestinian Occupied Territories:

https://novaramedia.com/2025/07/02/tech-giants-and-british-b...

(or get the report itself: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...)

If you do not like what Google is doing, just leave as I said before [0]. They don't care about you.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931336

> Jeff Dean ... and other senior employees pledged to “neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons.” Google signed the classified deal, yet they remain.

> I think he could have stopped the deal, yet he did not. He remains, yet I think he should not.

Is Jeff Dean still considered a saint at Google? If so, how come this doesn't change that? The amicus was enough?

tldr: scientist discovers reality

[flagged]

I mean, on the one hand, I support this. But this is going pretty far. When it comes to non-US police and military, if your threshold is killing 2 innocents (and the officers getting away with it), then you can't do business almost anywhere ...

With essentially any country, and even vaguely similar circumstances

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/05/belgian-police...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/20/belgian-police...

And this is just a random example country (with excellent beer), you will find worse than this in most/all European countries, especially in the last 10 years or so.

This is a long post about someone who has very obviously just gotten into politics. It is good for people to try and see how to impart change. Here are some constructive critical questions for the author:

1. Why no mention of No Tech For Apartheid or Google Workers United, who have been doing similar work for years?

2. What about all of the other police, DHS, and military contracts Google has been a part of? Did this problem really just start with the second (not even the first!) Trump presidency?

3. What does a focus on exclusively those at the top levels of a hierarchy, with minimal focus on incentive structures and wider systems, say about your theory of change? Was there a power analysis done, or was it assumed that "big title" = "powerful"?

Side Note: Incredibly insulting of James Dean to say email 3 CEOs.

It is honorable but ultimately hasn’t democracy spoken wrt the issues mentioned in the post?

For better or worse millions of Americans voted for the guy doing the deportations.

I also find it difficult to reconcile not using AI for weapons. If war is inevitable AI presumably would at least ensure you are on target.