Google Is Allegedly Paying Top AI Researchers to Just Sit Around and Not Work for the Competition

Google apparently has one weird trick to hoard its talent from poachers: paying them to not work.

As Business Insider reports, some United Kingdom-based employees at Google's DeepMind AI lab are paid to do nothing for six months — or, in fewer cases, up to a year — after they quit their jobs.

Known as "garden leave," this type of cushy clause is the luckier stepsister to so-called "noncompete" agreements, which prohibit employees and contractors from working with a competitor for a designated period of time after they depart an employer. Ostensibly meant to prevent aggressive poaching, these sorts of clauses also bar outgoing employees from working with competitors.

Often deployed in tandem with noncompetes, garden leave agreements are more prevalent in the UK than across the pond in the United States, where according to the Horton Group law firm, such clauses are generally reserved for "highly-paid executives."

Though it seems like a pretty good gig — or lack thereof — if you can get it, employees at DeepMind's London HQ told BI that garden leave and noncompetes stymie their ability to lock down meaningful work after they leave the lab.

While noncompetes are increasingly a nonstarter in the United States amid growing legislative pushes to make them unenforceable, they're perfectly legal and quite commonplace in the UK so long as a company explicitly states the business interests they're protecting.

Like DeepMind's generous garden leave period, noncompete clauses typically last between six months and a year — but instead of getting paid to garden, per the former's logic, ex-employees just can't work for competitors for that length of time without risking backlash from Google's army of lawyers.

Because noncompetes are often signed alongside non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), we don't know exactly what DeepMind considers a "competitor" — but whatever its contracts stipulate, it's clearly bothersome enough to get its former staffers to speak out.

"Who wants to sign you for starting in a year?" one ex-DeepMind-er told BI. "That's forever in AI."

In an X post from the end of March, Nando de Freitas, a London-based former DeepMind director who now works at Microsoft offered a brash piece of advice: that people should not sign noncompetes at all.

"Above all don’t sign these contracts," de Freitas wrote. "No American corporation should have that much power, especially in Europe. It’s abuse of power, which does not justify any end."

It's not a bad bit of counsel, to be sure — but as with any other company, it's easy to imagine DeepMind simply choosing not to hire experts if they refuse to sign.

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