According to information reported by Business Insider, Google Deepmind applies non-competition clauses qualified as “aggressive” to some of its employees based in the United Kingdom. These contractual arrangements prevent the engineers concerned from working for a competing company for a period of up to 12 months after their departure.
The particularity of this approach lies in the fact that Google continues to remunerate these employees during this period of forced inactivity. In practice, this is similar to a prolonged leave paid, but with a major constraint: the impossibility of pursuing an active career in the field of AI. For researchers and engineers concerned, this situation can be particularly frustrating. In a sector where innovation progresses at high speed, being excluded from developments for a whole year represents a significant professional handicap. This Google policy is part of a context of exacerbated competition between technological giants. Microsoft and Openai, in particular, intensified their recruitment efforts in the United Kingdom, particularly targeting the talents of Deepmind.
