There was also little doubt now that Google had strung along DeepMind’s founders, perhaps intentionally from the start. “It was a five-year suffocation strategy to dangle the carrot but never grant it,” says a former senior manager. “They let us grow larger and larger and become more and more dependent on them. They played us.” The founders of DeepMind failed to realize what was happening until it was too late. The political luminaries who’d agreed to be independent directors of the new DeepMind were told, with some embarrassment, that the project was off.
