Google DeepMind

Google DeepMind is Alphabet’s artificial-intelligence laboratory, headquartered in London with research centres across the United States, Canada, and continental Europe. It took its current form in April 2023, when Alphabet merged the original DeepMind — founded in London in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014 — with the Google Brain team out of Google Research. Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s co-founder, became chief executive of the combined unit, which now builds the Gemini family of foundation models behind Google’s AI products.

The lab sits near the centre of a defining episode in defence-tech history. In 2017 Google became the founding commercial contractor on the Pentagon’s Project Maven , supplying computer-vision algorithms to help analysts interpret drone surveillance footage. When the work became public, roughly 4,000 employees signed an open letter to chief executive Sundar Pichai declaring that “Google should not be in the business of war,” and about a dozen resigned. In June 2018 Google said it would let the Maven contract lapse, and published a set of AI Principles that explicitly barred work on weapons and on surveillance violating international norms — language that also led it to drop its bid for the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud contract. Maven did not stop; Palantir and others later carried it forward.

That posture has since softened. In February 2025, in a blog post co-written by Hassabis, Google rewrote its AI Principles and removed the section listing applications it would not pursue — the explicit ban on weapons and surveillance — framing the change around “a global competition” for AI leadership in which “democracies should lead.”

Today Alphabet’s defence footprint runs mainly through Google Cloud rather than the research lab. Google Public Sector is one of four awardees on the Pentagon’s $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract; Google Distributed Cloud reached Impact Level 6 authorisation in 2025 for Secret-classified workloads, including air-gapped appliances for tactical-edge use. Gemini reached federal customers through an August 2025 “Gemini for Government” agreement with the General Services Administration, and in December 2025 became the first commercial model on the Defense Department’s GenAI.mil platform, at Impact Level 5.

The research lab has kept its distance from direct weapons work. Roughly 200 DeepMind staff signed a May 2024 letter urging Alphabet to drop military contracts after reports of its Israeli Project Nimbus cloud deal; leadership replied that DeepMind would not build AI for weaponry or mass surveillance — a tension that persists between the lab’s stance and its parent’s defence business.