“DeepMind and Google: the Battle to Control Artificial Intelligence. Demis Hassabis Founded a Company to Build the World’s Most Powerful AI. Then Google Bought Him Out. Hal Hodson Asks Who Is in Charge”, 2019-03-01 (; backlinks):
For many founders, this would be a happy ending. They could slow down, take a step back and spend more time with their money. For Hassabis, the acquisition by Google was just another step in his pursuit of AGI. He had spent much of 2013 negotiating the terms of the deal. DeepMind would operate as a separate entity from its new parent. It would gain the benefits of being owned by Google, such as access to cash flow and computing power, without losing control.
…From the start, Hassabis has tried to protect DeepMind’s independence. He has always insisted that DeepMind remain in London. When Google bought the company in 2014, the question of control became more pressing. Hassabis didn’t need to sell DeepMind to Google. There was plenty of cash on hand and he had sketched out a business model in which the company would design games to fund research. Google’s financial heft was attractive, yet, like many founders, Hassabis was reluctant to hand over the company he had nurtured. As part of the deal, DeepMind created an arrangement that would prevent Google from unilaterally taking control of the company’s intellectual property. In the year leading up to acquisition, according to a person familiar with the transaction, both parties signed a contract called the Ethics and Safety Review Agreement. The agreement, previously unreported, was drawn up by senior barristers in London.
The Review Agreement puts control of DeepMind’s core AGI technology, whenever it may be created, in the hands of a governing panel known as the Ethics Board [apparently renamed “AGI Safety Council”]. Far from being a cosmetic concession from Google, the Ethics Board gives DeepMind solid legal backing to keep control of its most valuable and potentially most dangerous technology, according to the same source. The names of the panel members haven’t been made public, but another source close to both DeepMind and Google says that all 3 of DeepMind’s founders sit on the board. [Shane Legg is still head as of October 2023; Mustafa Suleyman is presumably long-gone.] (DeepMind refused to answer a detailed set of questions about the Review Agreement but said that “ethics oversight and governance has been a priority for us from the earliest days.”)