Unlike the ongoing wave of layoffs sweeping the tech industry and prompting top employees to pen heartbreaking farewell posts on social media, a Google director has chosen to walk away from the tech giant of his own accord. Back in 2017, the Sundar Pichai-led company made Rene Mayrhofer an offer he couldn’t refuse, appointing him Director of Android Platform Security. Nearly a decade later, he has quit Google, saying that it was no longer the same company he joined nine years ago.
Posting his full-fledged resignation letter on a personal blog post on June 7, Mayrhofer said that while his decision to quit the Google role was both “incredibly hard” and “easy,” he was ultimately “forced to say farewell” because the company’s management “has lost its moral compass.” The letter explaining his rationale behind leaving the post initially received little attention, but it gained traction in US headlines this week after Business Insider claimed to have obtained the “farewell note” the top executive shared with colleagues internally.
Google’s Director of Android Platform Security emphasised that Donald Trump was already president in 2017 when he first took on his role at the company. However, the firm, according to Mayrhofer’s resignation letter, has since “quietly abandoned” certain goals. As for his reason for quitting, he largely blamed Google management for “signing deals with the US Ministry of War” despite Pichai’s own “AI principles” published in 2018, going a different direction and heavy backlash from employees.
Google director says Sundar Pichai’s principles contradict new company direction
“Google was the place to be to getting things done on a global scale,” Mayrhofer wrote in his blog post earlier this month. “The culture was transparent and open to diverse discourse, and from the start it was made clear that, as Googlers, we were not only welcome but expected to bring our own identity and values into the job.”
The former Google director, who also holds a Professorship at Johannes Kepler University Linz and acts as the head of the Institute for Networks and Security, identifies as a “pacifist.” Thanking Dave Kleidermacher, the VP of Engineering for Android Security & Privacy at Google, and Nick Kralevich, the head of Android platform security at Google, for trusting him, he expressed gratitude for being offered the chance to “lead on the inside.”
Simultaneously, he admitted that even though he was never involved “with the cloud side of things,” the company’s overall goal was still to become “completely carbon-neutral.” It had even forced years-old Pentagon contracts to be cancelled after employees spoke up against them. As he claims to have signed an open letter regarding the matter in 2018 himself, the ex-Google executive added that CEO Sundar Pichai‘s “AI principles” in a blog post, stating certain parameters that were against the new Pentagon AI deal.
As highlighted in Pichai’s post at the time, the company emphasised that “AI applications we will not pursue: … 2. Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people. 3. Technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms. 4. Technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
Google director says resignation was ‘unavoidable’ over Pentagon’s AI deal
Drawing parallels between the “old Google” and where the company is today, Rene Mayrhofer wrote, “Google management is now signing deals with the US Ministry of War—where ‘any lawful purpose’ by the current US government has already been repeatedly demonstrated to be in violation of international laws.”
He referenced Google signing a deal with the Pentagon to provide artificial intelligence models for what US officials described as “any lawful purpose,” asserting that it had already been repeatedly demonstrated to be in “violation of international laws.”
The deal went through despite numerous Google workers banding together and petitioning to refuse classified AI work to the US Department of War, months after Anthropic was dropped as a potential partner by the department. More than 600 employees signed a letter, demanding that CEO Sundar Pichai not to forge the contractual bond with the US Department of Defence, according to a copy of the document seen by The Washington Post at the time.
Despite the heavy backlash from within the company, the former Google director said the decisions were being made by “top-level management.” Even though he was also part of the chain before, he claims to have never heard of “any of these changes through internal channels.”
Further expressing his personal viewpoint, Rene Mayrhofer wrote on his blog, “With my moral and ethical principles, I cannot—explicitly or implicitly, directly or transitively—support the current and ongoing actions of the ‘Maximum lethality, not tepid legality’ US Ministry of War.” Reiterating that the top-level management’s direction had left him with no choice but to resign.
While he noted that the decision to quit Google was “incredibly hard” for him and that he will miss everyone, the former top executive called the decision “unavoidable” and “easy,” given his stance as a “pacifist.”
Mayrhofer confessed that he had decided well in advance that he would not work for “militaries engaging in offensive warfare (strictly defensive action is somewhat different),” as “proactively harming people” wasn’t something he could be involved with. Moreover, as a European academic, he added that the current administration posed a threat to him and EU citizens at large, as its “lawful purpose” clause could fuel mass surveillance targeting them.
“This deal implies that Google (AI) products will likely be used directly against me and mine. In this recent environment, I don’t see how I could not resign,” the former Google director asserted.
Hoping that Google management “re-discovers its moral compass,” Mayrhofer said his current contract entails that he gives the company a notice period of three months. As highlighted in his blog post, he will continue to be formally associated with the company until August 31, 2026. During this time, he maintained that he would be focused on wrapping up his work or passing it forward. Nonetheless, he affirmed that he would “immediately disconnect from any work on AI systems” that may be linked to the deal with the US Department of War.
Offering insight into what he will be doing next , he wrote, “I will continue to work on end-to-end encrypted, resilient communication and storage protocols, privacy-preserving digital identity, embedded systems security, operating systems and supply chain security, and related topics.”
As of now, Google has not commented on Mayrhofer’s resignation or blog post. However, the company previously said that it was “proud” to be a part of a project, which is “in support of national security.”
In a statement to Business Insider, the tech giant said, “We remain committed to the private and public sector consensus that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight.”