UK plans to end non-competes that kept some Google DeepMind staff away from rivals for up to a year
Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced the move in Manchester on October 9, and it lands squarely on one of Britain’s most prized tech employers, Google DeepMind. Some DeepMind staff in London have reportedly been barred from working for competitors for up to 12 months after leaving.
Google has said its contracts are in line with market standards and that it uses non-competes selectively. Former DeepMind director Nando de Freitas, now a vice-president at Microsoft AI, said last year that DeepMind employees reached out to him every week asking how to escape their notice periods and non-competes. The UK government plans to legislate against non-compete clauses, the contract terms that stop employees from joining a rival or starting a company for months after they quit. Many sit out that period on garden leave, drawing full pay from Google while doing no work for it. With Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta hiring aggressively in London, those clauses have become a sore point for researchers and for the startups trying to hire them. At DeepMind, the length of a non-compete has reportedly depended on a person’s seniority and how critical their work is. Six months was common, including for engineers working on Gemini, while some senior researchers got a full year. For Google, the change arrives in the middle of a run of high-profile exits. Nobel laureate John Jumper, who co-led AlphaFold, is moving to Anthropic but is not expected to start until next year, a delay that lines up with the cooling-off periods UK non-competes impose. Gemini researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel have also left for Anthropic, while Noam Shazeer joined OpenAI after more than two decades at Google.