A former DeepMind engineer has said he questioned the use of the company’s AI products by West Jerusalem for military purposes
A former AI engineer at Google DeepMind has accused the US tech giant of unfairly dismissing him over protests against the company’s deals with Israel, The Guardian reported on Wednesday. The man described the decision to fire him as discriminatory and filed a claim with a British employment tribunal.
Google’s ties with the Israeli government, including a $1.2 billion AI and cloud computing contract signed jointly with Amazon, have repeatedly sparked employee protests. In 2024 alone, the company fired dozens of dissenting staff members.
According to the engineer, he was called into a meeting with a manager that led to his dismissal after distributing flyers around DeepMind’s London office reading: “Google provides military AI to forces committing genocide” and “Is your paycheck worth this?” He also reportedly sent emails to his colleagues and called on them to unionize.
The former employee, who is of Palestinian origin, alleged in his lawsuit that Google discriminated against his belief that no one should be complicit in war crimes and claimed he was acting as a whistleblower, according to The Guardian. The US tech giant insisted that the employee’s version of events “does not accurately reflect the facts” and said that he had resigned.
In October, several media outlets reported that the 2021 agreement Google and Amazon signed with Israel barred the companies from restricting West Jerusalem’s access to their services even in cases it violated their terms of use. The deal also reportedly included clauses explicitly preventing the two tech giants from breaking ties with Israel under pressure from employees, shareholders and activists.
Israel’s contracts with US tech companies have come under increased scrutiny amid accusations that its military campaign in Gaza following the 2023 Hamas attack amounts to genocide. In 2024, Gaby Portnoy, head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, credited the Google-Amazon Nimbus Project with enabling “phenomenal things” in combat that he said “constitute a significant part of victory.”
