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Google DeepMind Engineer Resigns in Protest of Pentagon Contract

Sofia Liguori stepped down from DeepMind due to current military contracts — not speculative fears of an AI apocalypse.

Sofia Liguori, a research engineer working at DeepMind, resigned in protest this week from Google’s pioneering artificial intelligence laboratory. Unlike a wave of other AI researchers who have quit over fears AI might someday turn against humanity, Liguori stepped down over concern about her employer’s current practices.

Disenchanted and disturbed by Google’s military contracts with the U.S. and Israel, Liguori says she could no longer stand working at a company that was going to help kill people or help build technology that “automatically makes it easier to escalate the brutality of war.”

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Liguori joined DeepMind in 2023 and began working on AI systems aimed at more efficiently routing power through the electrical grid, a peacetime engineering problem. But as she learned of Google’s Project Nimbus contract, which furnishes Israel’s military and top weapons manufacturers with a suite of advanced artificial intelligence tools, she began to question her role in the company, and the company’s role in the world. The day after Google announced its classified military AI contract with the Pentagon in April, Liguori staged a personal sick-out, using a combination of sick leave and holiday time off to cease her work.

In a letter she sent internally informing DeepMind and her colleagues of her resignation, Liguori urged them to “stay human” in the face of military work. “I no longer believe that our technology will have a net positive impact on society. I think there’s a fantasy world where AI can help decarbonize grids, cut waste, protect ecosystems, and benefit humanity,” she wrote. “But it’s not this world, and it’s not this type of general purpose AI we are racing to develop. Racing to deploy agentic AI in this society and historical moment is a terrible idea, and will definitely be a net evil.”

The Intercept spoke to Liguori, an Italian national living in London, where DeepMind is headquartered, about how she came to view her employer as dangerously powerful. During a series of interviews by phone and via text, which have been edited and condensed for length and clarity, she explained her moral opposition to military work, the role of unionization in dissent, and what hope engineers and scientists might have for influencing their companies.

What was it about DeepMind that made you want to work there?

I had a high opinion of DeepMind; it was a dream company. It had this aura of being a research-oriented place where you could sit close not just to computer scientists, but real scientists and researchers and people with backgrounds in biology, in physics, in mathematics, in ecology, in anthropology.

You joined in 2023, by which point the company had already been involved in Project Nimbus. Were you aware of that project at the time?

Not really. The first year when I joined, I was very new and very isolated in my team. Google DeepMind is a huge company and if you’re not in the right channels, you end up being very siloed. I didn’t know about Project Nimbus, but when the Gaza war escalated, I discovered it. I immediately looked for some internal resistance movement to join, but I didn’t find anything.

I discovered [Google employee advocacy group] No Tech for Apartheid, but I thought it was mainly a U.S. organization. I didn’t know how to connect with colleagues that share concerns, so the only thing that I did was buy a Palestine hoodie and go to the office with that.

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In the summer of 2024, I went on maternity leave because my daughter was born, and during maternity leave I was watching news from Gaza every day. I was really suffering experiencing maternity and watching a livestreamed genocide, and every time I was thinking of my company’s complicity in that. I thought about not coming back to work at all.

When I was due to come back, I met a colleague that had basically taken my role in my team before maternity leave, and they were actually leaving for ethical reasons. They put me in contact with the union movement and No Tech for Apartheid. And so I found other colleagues fighting against this.

How and when did you learn of the company’s contracts with the U.S. military?

By the time they started engaging with the U.S. Department of War, [Editor’s note: July 2025] I was already involved in activism. By this winter we saw the GenAI.mil contract materializing, and for me, this was a very clear indication of the company’s intentions. At the same time Google ramped up the security level authorization for Cloud: IL6, which is the level required to handle classified workloads.

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