Meredith Whittaker, a former program manager at Google, said she was prohibited from pursuing her work around AI ethics and accountability in the tech industry at the company. Whittaker—who co-founded the AI Now Institute, a New York University-affiliated research centre—helped lead protests over the company’s handling of sexual harassment, its work building drones for the U.S. military and its reliance on contract workers. (The Logic)

Talking point: Whittaker’s departure follows that of Claire Stapleton, part of a group of seven who helped Whittaker organize a 20,000-worker global walkout in October 2018. The two alleged they faced retaliation from the company following the walkout and their ongoing pressure on Google to meet the organizers’ demands. Google has denied the claims. Whittaker said she has little faith in Google’s willingness to improve working conditions and uphold AI ethics. “Google, in the conventional pursuit of quarterly earnings, is gaining significant and largely unchecked power to impact our world (including in profoundly dangerous ways, such as accelerating the extraction of fossil fuels and the deployment of surveillance technology),” she said. That sentiment was echoed by an engineer still at Google who broke the news on Twitter Monday evening, saying Whittaker’s experience at the company and departure “cannot signal good things for how AI institutions will react to negative criticism.”