In a letter to Google’s UK and Ireland managing director, Debbie Weinstein, workers asked the company to recognize the Communications Workers’ Union and Unite the Union as joint representatives of DeepMind employees.
“Fundamentally, the push for unions is about holding Google to its own ethical standards for AI, how it monetizes it, what the products do, and who they work with,” John Chadfield, CWU’s national chief technology officer, tells WIRED. “Through the process of unionization, workers are collectively in a much stronger position [demands] To an increasingly tone-deaf administration.
The push to unionize began in February 2025, when Alphabet, Google’s parent company, removed its pledge not to use artificial intelligence for purposes such as weapons development and surveillance from its ethics guidelines, according to a DeepMind employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“A lot of people here have bought into Google DeepMind’s mantra to ‘build AI responsibly for the benefit of humanity,’” one DeepMind employee told WIRED. “The direction of travel is to further militarize the AI models we build here.”
This concern is increasingly reflected throughout the industry. In late February, staff at DeepMind and OpenAI signed an open letter in support of Anthropic, after the US Department of Defense sought to designate the lab as a supply chain risk due to its refusal to allow its AI to be used in autonomous weapons or in mass surveillance of US citizens. Last week, the New York Times reported that Google had struck a deal allowing the Pentagon to use its artificial intelligence “for any legitimate government purpose.” (On Friday, the US Department of Defense confirmed that it had reached deals with seven leading AI companies – including Google, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Microsoft – to use their models on classified networks.) Nearly 600 US-based Google employees have reportedly signed a letter protesting the deal. “We believe that [any-lawful-purpose] “The phrase is vague enough to be virtually meaningless,” says the DeepMind employee.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has previously defended its deals with government organizations. “We are proud to be part of a broad consortium of leading AI labs and technology and cloud companies that provide AI services and infrastructure in support of national security,” Google spokeswoman Jane Kreider told the New York Times last week. “We are committed to the private and public sector consensus that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons without appropriate human oversight.”
In 2021, Google employees in the US formed the Alphabet Workers Union. The union is not recognized by Alphabet for collective bargaining purposes but has previously successfully negotiated agreements on behalf of Google contractors.
A DeepMind employee told WIRED that if employees succeed in unionizing in the UK, they will likely demand that Google withdraw its long-standing contract with the Israeli military and seek greater transparency about how its AI products are used, with the kind of safeguards on layoffs made possible by automation.
If Google doesn’t participate, the letter states, employees will ask an arbitration panel to force the company to recognize unions.
Since the turn of the year, both Anthropic and OpenAI have announced large-scale expansions of their London operations. CWU hopes that unionization efforts at DeepMind will motivate workers at those labs to take similar action.
“These conversations happen,” Chadfield says. “Workers at other frontier laboratories have seen what the people at Google DeepMind have done. They have come to us for help, too.”
