Staff at Google DeepMind's London headquarters have voted to unionize in a direct attempt to block the AI lab's technology from being sold to the US Department of Defense and the Israeli military. In a letter delivered Tuesday to Debbie Weinstein, Google's managing director for the UK and Ireland, employees asked the company to recognize the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union as joint representatives. 98% of CWU members at DeepMind voted in favor, and the bid covers roughly 1,000 staff based in London.
Google management now has 10 working days to voluntarily recognize the unions before legal proceedings begin to force recognition. If successful, it would be the first formally recognized union inside a frontier AI lab — a category that includes Gemini-maker DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The Alphabet Workers Union, formed by US-based Google employees in 2021, has never won collective bargaining recognition from Alphabet.
The unionization push began in February 2025, after Alphabet quietly removed a pledge not to use AI for weapons development or surveillance from its public ethics guidelines. Last week the US Department of Defense confirmed deals with seven leading AI companies — including Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, and SpaceX — to run their models on classified networks. Roughly 600 US-based Google employees signed a letter protesting the deal before it was announced.
Key facts
- 0198% of CWU members at Google DeepMind voted to back unionization, in a letter delivered to Google management on Tuesday.
- 02The bid would cover roughly 1,000 staff at DeepMind's London headquarters if Google grants voluntary recognition.
- 03Management has 10 working days to recognize the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union before legal processes begin.
- 04Google signed a US Department of Defense deal last week alongside six other AI firms allowing model use for 'any lawful government purpose.'
- 05Google fired more than 50 staffers in 2024 after protests over its military ties to the Israeli government.
The terms of Google's Pentagon contract, first reported by The New York Times, allow the use of its AI for 'any lawful government purpose.' DeepMind staff are not buying the framing. 'We think the [any lawful purpose] clause is vague enough to be effectively meaningless,' one DeepMind employee said, asking not to be named for fear of retaliation.
“Even if our work is only used for administrative purposes, as leadership has repeatedly told us, it is still helping make genocide cheaper, faster, and more efficient.”— Jaeden Schafer
The union's demands are specific. Workers want Google to commit to not building weapons, surveillance technologies, or contracts that harm people; to negotiate over AI deployments that 'materially affect our roles, workloads, or job security'; and to grant employees the right to abstain from projects that violate their personal ethics. Staff are also weighing in-person protests and 'research strikes' that would pause work on Google's Gemini AI assistant.
'A lot of people here bought into the Google DeepMind tagline to build AI responsibly to benefit humanity,' the same employee said. 'The direction of travel is to further militarization of the AI models we're building here.' Another DeepMind employee was blunter, saying the lab's models are already 'helping make genocide cheaper, faster, and more efficient' through Google's long-standing contract with the Israeli military.
John Chadfield, the CWU's national officer for technology, framed the vote as an industrywide test. 'Fundamentally, the push for unionization is about holding Google to its own ethical standards on AI, how they monetize it, what the products do, and who they work with,' he said. 'Through the process of unionization, workers are collectively in a much stronger place to put demands to an increasingly deaf management.'
Google has defended its government work. 'We are proud to be part of a broad consortium of leading AI labs and technology and cloud companies providing AI services and infrastructure in support of national security,' spokeswoman Jenn Crider said last week. The company added that AI 'should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight' — a line DeepMind staff note does not extend to foreign militaries.
The labor action lands in a brittle moment for Google's AI workforce. In 2024 the company fired more than 50 staffers in response to a sit-in protest over its military contracts with Israel. CEO Sundar Pichai received an open letter last week from hundreds of US employees urging him to refuse classified Pentagon work; days later Google signed anyway. AI Chat Daily reported on those Pentagon deals as they landed, including the awkward fact that Anthropic was shut out after refusing some of the same use cases DeepMind staff are now protesting.
The bid is not guaranteed to succeed. Voluntary recognition is a high bar, and Alphabet has a long record of resisting union drives — the 2021 Alphabet Workers Union remains unrecognized for collective bargaining five years on. Even with recognition, the union would have to extract binding contract terms over which clients DeepMind can serve, a concession few employers grant on commercial strategy. Chadfield concedes that legal process may be required.
Chadfield says CWU is already in conversations with workers at other London-based AI labs. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have announced large-scale London expansions since the turn of the year, putting hundreds of new researchers and engineers within reach of UK labor law, which makes union recognition meaningfully easier than in the US. 'The workers at other frontier labs have seen what Google DeepMind workers have done,' he said. 'They've come to us asking for help as well.'
For Google, the calculus is uncomfortable. The Pentagon deal is small in revenue terms next to the company's cloud and advertising business, but the symbolic value of being a defense-grade AI vendor is large at a moment when Anthropic's refusal to play has cost it classified contracts. Losing the labor cooperation of the unit that builds Gemini, in exchange for that positioning, is a trade Alphabet has not previously had to price. The next 10 working days will decide whether it has to start.
Working on something we should cover, or seeing a story we missed? Send leads, documents, or feedback to hello@aichatdaily.com. For sensitive tips, see our secure tips page for Signal and PGP options.
Spotted an error? Email hello@aichatdaily.com with the URL and the issue, or read our full corrections policy.
