DeepMind Engineer Quits Over Nimbus and Pentagon AI Work

Sofia Liguori, a research engineer at DeepMind, resigned in protest this week and told The Intercept she could no longer stand working at a company 'going to help kill people or help build technology that automatically makes it easier to escalate the brutality of war.'

The trigger, in her account, was Google's expanding military book: Project Nimbus, which 'furnishes Israel's military and top weapons manufacturers with a suite of advanced artificial intelligence tools,' and the company's Pentagon work. 'AI for targeting is very dangerous; it creates a system where it's easier to escalate the brutality of war,' Liguori said. In her resignation note: 'I no longer believe that our technology will have a net positive impact on society.'

Internal dissent, in her telling, was managed by moderation. 'I had several posts deleted because they contained the word "genocide," and I was told that genocide is an intrinsically violent word, and so I was violating internal policies,' she said. She described a wider chill too: 'The company was very effective at creating a pervasive sense of fear, which induces self-censorship.'

She says others have followed her out. 'Some have quit already, some publicly and some silently. There have been many people leaving because of ethical reasons. Not all of them publicized it.' DeepMind employees voted to unionize in May. In February she co-organized a protest outside the office under banners reading 'No AI in the kill chain' and 'No Gemini for Genocide.'

A Google spokesperson told The Intercept the company 'work[s] with public sector organisations worldwide and follow[s] a consistent process for reviewing and entering these contracts, including compliance with our acceptable use policies and AI principles.' The article attaches no dollar figure to Nimbus and no count of other resignations.

It is the lab's latest appearance in our Google tracker, and lands days after Demis Hassabis trimmed his AGI window to two or three years in a WSJ profile.