Google Deepmind Employees Resign in Protest over AI Deal with Trump's Pentagon

22 Oct 2026, 18:09 by Lucas Nolan · Breitbart

Several Google DeepMind employees have resigned in recent weeks over the company’s Pentagon contract signed earlier this year that allows its AI technology to be used in classified settings.

BBC News reports that Sofia Liguori, a London-based research engineer, left Google DeepMind this week after three years at the company. Speaking to the BBC in a personal capacity, despite a contract that restricts her from doing so, she said: “Realizing my company is pushing more and more for AI systems in military operations makes me feel ashamed to work at Google.”

Liguori said she has lost confidence in the company’s commitment to its own ethical standards. “I don’t agree with this direction and this has led me to lose faith in my company being true to its stated ethical values,” she said. She also said the terms of her departure leave little room to speak out in future: “In principle I’m not allowed to criticize Google for the duration of my life.”

She is not alone. Andreas Kirsch, an AI researcher, resigned from Google DeepMind earlier this month over similar concerns. He told the BBC that “Google’s governance and oversight are not sufficient or meaningful enough to deploy AI safely and responsibly in military and classified settings.” Kirsch said he wants “to develop artificial superintelligence safely in the future,” and questioned how little control Google keeps once its technology reaches the battlefield. “Google seems to have no right to control or veto how the Pentagon uses its AI and also seems to have limited visibility into how it’s being deployed,” he said.

The departures follow a contract Google signed earlier this year with the US military to deploy AI across classified environments. OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Oracle, Nvidia and the start-up Reflection have signed comparable agreements. The push coincides with a broader drive by the Pentagon to accelerate AI adoption. War Secretary Pete Hegseth said in January that the United States “will become an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force.” Emil Michael, an under secretary in the Department of Defense, said in a statement this year that “speed defines victory in the AI era.”

That urgency has drawn scrutiny. Jack Shanahan, a retired Lieutenant General and former director of Project Maven, described the Pentagon’s approach as one that aims to “go as fast as possible to deploy [AI technology] as widely as possible, potentially at the expense of the rigor and discipline of test and evaluation.” Maven Smart Systems, the Pentagon’s main software platform for organizing intelligence and data, was developed by the defense company Palantir and uses AI to help personnel identify and select targets to strike. Palantir has folded technology from several leading AI companies into the Maven system.

Google’s contract with the Pentagon permits its AI to be used for “any lawful government purpose,” according to the document, though it also states the technology “should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons (including target selection) without appropriate human oversight and control.”

Breitbart News previously reported on the resignation of a high profile Google AI researcher who said he was “incredibly ashamed” by his employer working with the Pentagon:

Andreas Kirsch, who works as a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, voiced strong criticism of the company’s latest Pentagon agreement in a post on X on Tuesday. “I’m speechless at Google signing a deal to use our AI models for classified tasks. Frankly, it is shameful,” he wrote. The deal came despite significant internal opposition from Google employees. More than 600 workers had sent a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai urging him to block the Pentagon from using the company’s AI for classified operations. Kirsch told Business Insider, “When I went to bed yesterday, I was hopeful that the employee letter would have an effect and give us pause to consider,” he said in a text message. “This morning I woke up to a worst-case version of the contract being signed by Google in the meantime.”

Google’s extreme leftist employee population is not interested in supporting America and the defense of our country. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.