# Google AI Ethics Firing The **Google AI Ethics Firing** refers to [[Google]]'s termination of AI ethics researchers [[Timnit Gebru]] (December 2020) and Margaret Mitchell (February 2021), co-leads of Google's Ethical AI team. The firings followed conflict over a research paper examining the risks of large language models — including environmental costs, training data biases, and the tendency of scale to amplify existing inequities. Gebru, one of the most prominent Black women in AI research, said she was fired after pushing back on Google's demand to retract the paper or remove her name. Mitchell was terminated weeks later after she used automated tools to search her corporate email for evidence of discrimination against Gebru. The episode became a landmark case in the tension between [[AI Ethics]] research and the commercial incentives of companies building the systems being scrutinized. It demonstrated how [[Tech Oligarchy]] dynamics can suppress internal dissent, and catalyzed broader debate about whether meaningful AI safety work can exist inside the companies whose products it critiques.