Google staff resign in backlash over its AI contracts with military - BBC

The BBC has spoken to the people who build Google DeepMind's models and discovered that a fair few of them have decided they'd rather not. Research engineer Sofia Liguori has resigned, citing Google's "increasing work with the US and Israeli militaries" — increasing being the adjective a defence contractor puts in an investor deck and an engineer puts in a resignation letter once she has run out of politer ones. One resigns, several are "in the process of leaving", which in corporate dialect means the notice periods are staggered and the exit interviews are being carefully scheduled around the launch calendar.

Notice the direction of travel. The people who understand what the models actually do are walking out of the door, while the people who understand what the contracts are worth are holding it open for them. Google DeepMind has spent years as the industry's designated adults, the lab you cite when somebody asks whether safety culture exists at all — and it turns out the culture was a handful of researchers with consciences and a shared calendar. Meanwhile Sundar Pichai has been describing an era of "recursive self-improvement" we covered recently, in which frontier models help build the next frontier models. Marvellous: the recursion evidently stops short of asking what the models are actually for.

The headline calls it a backlash, which flatters everyone involved — a backlash implies pressure, a response, a memo. What is actually happening is quieter and worse: the ethics people leave, the contracts stay, and the org chart closes over the gap like water. Google gets to keep the revenue and lose the people who would have asked awkward questions about where it comes from, and no quarterly review on earth will book that as a cost. The rest of us get a marginally thinner safety team and a marginally thicker order book, which is the sort of trade a spreadsheet calls neutral. Somewhere a strategy document calls this "talent fluidity". The talent, one suspects, calls it something shorter.