Workers at the UK branch of Google’s AI lab, DeepMind, have voted to unionise – partly in a bid to resist deals with the US and Israeli militaries.

The workers wrote to management on Tuesday to request the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union be recognised as their representatives, after voting to unionise in April. Google finalised a new deal to supply DeepMind technologies to the Pentagon last week.

“I have joined the union due to concerns about AI being used to empower authoritarianism, whether through military or surveillance applications, both foreign and domestic,” one worker told the Guardian.

“Our technology helped the IDF,” another worker said, referring to Google’s sale of DeepMind services to Israel’s military. “I want AI to benefit humanity, not to facilitate a genocide.”

The company’s work with Israel’s military, which has slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza while committing numerous other atrocity crimes, has sparked the No Tech for Apartheid campaign.

The campaign aims to put an end to Project Nimbus, a $1.2bn agreement that Google and Amazon made with Israel to supply its military and government with cloud computing services.

As part of the agreement, Israel reportedly demanded that both companies sidestep their legal obligations in other countries by secretly warning the apartheid state when they were made to share Israeli data with any courts.

The Pentagon confirmed on Friday that it had reached deals with DeepMind and several other AI companies, including SpaceX, OpenAI, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

“These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare,” the US department of war said in a statement.

Joshua Carroll is a writer and journalist.

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