DeepMind Engineer Resigns Over Google's Military Cloud Contract With Israel, Calls Out 'Complicity' in Gaza

Sofia Liguori spent her last weeks at Google DeepMind trying to organize colleagues against a contract most of them had never heard of. Last week she quit, sending a resignation letter titled "Stay Human" that denounced what she called Google's complicity in the Gaza genocide.

Liguori, a research engineer, told Democracy Now! she first learned about the contract in 2024, when Google fired employees in the United States who were protesting it. The deal, known as Nimbus, is a $1.2 billion cloud and AI services contract Google and Amazon signed with the Israeli government in 2021. According to Liguori and reporting by The Intercept, which she cited as a primary source, the contract serves both civilian government agencies and the Israeli military, including the IDF.

"I felt I could not, in good faith, send this message of building AI to benefit humanity while ignoring that our company was complicit in a genocide," Liguori said.

Liguori said Nimbus has never been fully disclosed to the public, and that Google's own statements about the contract have since been contradicted by leaked documents and investigative reporting. She said the deal includes access to Gemini, Google's large language model, and that Israeli officials have publicly acknowledged the importance of cloud infrastructure to the war in Gaza. She said there is no public accounting of every system the contract has touched.

Those characterizations are Liguori's own, drawn from her reading of leaked material and outside reporting rather than from a released contract text. She also said Google's internal and external legal counsel had warned the deal carried human-rights risks and recommended against including AI services or Google's own AI principles in the agreement, a claim she did not support with a document in the interview.

After returning from maternity leave, Liguori said a departing colleague connected her to Unionize Tech Against War, known as UTAW, a worker movement that had formed inside DeepMind. She said she chose to stay and organize rather than resign immediately, pushing to "break the silence around Nimbus" before ultimately leaving the company.

Google has previously defended the Nimbus contract publicly as compliant with its terms of service and not directed at classified or weapons-related work, a position Liguori disputes. Google did not respond to Democracy Now!'s request for comment included in the broadcast segment.