In a letter slated to go to management on Tuesday and shared exclusively with the Guardian, workers at Google DeepMind, the company’s AI research laboratory, requested recognition of the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union as joint representatives of the lab’s UK-based staff.
DeepMind’s UK workers voted to unionize in April. One of the workers said they were particularly driven by reports that Google was close to reaching a deal with the defense department and pointed to the US’s “capricious Iran war” and the Trump administration’s feud with Anthropic as indications that the department is “not a responsible partner”. The deal was ultimately announced on Friday.
[...]
Another worker, who also requested anonymity, said that many at the company had struggled with what they had come to view as their complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza. The company provided the Israeli military with increased access to its AI tools from the early days of the war in Gaza, the Washington Post reported last year, and in 2021, it signed, along with Amazon, a $1.2bn cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government.
From the article:
[...]