The messy politics behind Google’s big AI shakeup

In the AI industry, Google prides itself on seeming like the adult in the room: quiet, stable, time-tested. On Wednesday, even as the company announced its largest AI org shakeup yet, Google and its leaders presented a unified front, keeping their messaging focused on how the changes tee up future success.

But the reality is that the laundry list of executive changes likely signal deeper issues within Google’s AI organization. That starts with its tenuous position in the AI race, and it stretches to problems like Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis’ interest in longer-term research over shorter-term product shipping, as well as bubbling political opposition from top employees like DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean.

A current Google employee, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said one of the changes — Dean’s departure — is an example of “the vestiges of Google’s idealism” fully dying out. “Losing Jeff continues the brain drain at Google,” they said. “Mediocrity is the likely result.”

Wednesday’s news rocked the AI industry, which is difficult to do during an era when AI researchers are constantly switching between roles and labs like a game of musical chairs. Google announced that Demis Hassabis is stepping away from DeepMind’s day-to-day operations to focus on AGI and research; Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s current CTO, will step up to lead DeepMind in Hassabis’ place. At the same time, Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran and the company’s 30th employee, will leave the organization alongside three top Google AI researchers to form a new AI startup.

Google is widely viewed as being the most successful of the established tech giants in the AI race, far surpassing progress by Meta, Amazon, and Apple. But Google is still viewed as slower-moving than OpenAI and Anthropic, and it certainly hasn’t lapped them in frontier models. Both Hassabis and Google CEO Sundar Pichai made that point in their statements.

“We are committed to being at the frontier, and are super focused on the areas where we need to improve,” Pichai wrote, adding, “We have to continue to move fast and with clear purpose here.” Hassabis wrote that the company is entering a “next chapter” and that it has “all the ingredients to lead from here, and I firmly believe we will.”

Key figures in the AI industry seemed to view the changes as Hassabis stepping to the side in favor of a faster-moving, product-focused push at GDM.

“There’s been far more internal competition at Google than I’ve seen in the last decade primarily around the AI product space,” one former Google employee, who recently left the company and had knowledge of Google’s AI operations, told The Verge. They added that there’s been pressure to hire more employees who can speed up launches of more products, in keeping with the intensifying competition.

Another source within the AI industry, who requested anonymity due to ongoing work with AI labs, said, “I agree with everyone’s read that this is a sign of Demis’ loss of influence.”

Hassabis hasn’t been quiet in sharing that his interests lie in the scientific advancements that could come from AI, perhaps more so than the commercialization of the technology. Pichai wrote in a blog post that Hassabis’ next move will focus on “actively shaping the future of AGI” as DeepMind chair and Alphabet’s chief scientist, while continuing his role leading the drug-discovery spinoff Isomorphic Labs.

But AI leadership is only one of the problems facing Google — and industry insiders The Verge spoke with kept coming back to one main question: How much of this had to do with increasing ethical conflicts within Google itself?

A contributing factor to both Hassabis’s role change and Dean’s departure may have been Google’s deal with the Department of Defense, Tyler Johnston, founder of the nonprofit AI industry watchdog The Midas Project, told The Verge. That deal could potentially allow for the use of Google AI in mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons.

“This has already caused staff departures and a unionization effort at DeepMind,” Johnston said. “There are many signs suggesting Dean and Hassabis may have personally felt opposed. In fact, DeepMind was initially acquired by Google with an agreement not to sell the technology for military or intelligence purposes.”

Zvi Mowshowitz, a blogger followed closely by AI researchers, echoed that Dean’s decision to leave could potentially be “related to Google’s decisions on the DoW contract.”

Dean is leaving to launch Discovery Loop, an AI startup that aims to automate thousands of science and engineering experiments in areas like drug discovery, hardware design, clean energy, and material design. Joining him as cofounders are three additional top Google AI researchers: Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals.

“Losing Jeff feels like a blow for morality and basic human decency within Google,” the current Google employee said. “He was one of the few remaining visible, powerful figures here who was willing to speak out on moral issues such as ICE agents executing American citizens, AI surveillance, and autonomous lethal weapons.”

Dean was one of the most high-profile dissenters to the Department of Defense’s labeling of Anthropic as a supply chain risk after the company stood firm on its red lines for military use of its AI. In March, Dean was one of dozens of tech industry leaders and employees to file an amicus brief in support of Anthropic’s lawsuit, laying out concerns over the Trump administration’s decision — as well as about AI’s risks and implications. (He also pushed back on the Trump administration in January, saying that ICE’s killing of Alex Pretti was “absolutely shameful” and that “every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.”)

In April, after Anthropic’s drawn-out fight with the DoD over its red lines — prohibiting domestic mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons (with no human in the loop) — Google became one of the companies to happily fill the gap left by Anthropic’s Pentagon blacklisting. Like a handful of other companies, Google signed on to allow the Pentagon to use its AI for “any lawful use.”

Dean had publicly disavowed both the same red lines in the past. In February, he wrote on X, “Mass surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment and has a chilling effect on freedom of expression. Surveillance systems are prone to misuse for political or discriminatory purposes.” And in 2018, both Dean and Hassabis signed a public pledge disavowing lethal autonomous weapons: “We the undersigned agree that the decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine.”

Alex Turner, a Google researcher who quit over the company’s Pentagon deal, wrote in an op-ed last month that Dean’s “departure would be a disaster for the company” and that “by signing [the amicus brief], he broke from the company line, which probably made things awkward within the C-suite.”

In the amicus brief that Dean signed earlier this year, the group wrote, “We build, train, and study the large-scale AI systems that serve a wide range of users and deployments, including in the consequential domains of national security, law enforcement, and military operations.” The group described itself as “professionals with direct knowledge of what these systems can and cannot do, and what is at stake when their deployment outpaces the legal and ethical frameworks designed to govern them.”

Dean’s departure may remove a high-profile critic, but it certainly won’t dispel criticism within the organization as a whole. Since the beginning of the year, an increasing number of Google employees have expressed discontent with the organization’s politics.

“Sergey [Brin] did a 180 politically, Sundar stood behind Trump at his inauguration,” the current Google employee said. “Now one of the only remaining figures at the company willing to speak out on moral issues is gone. Who knows what we will sell out next?”