'There's This Deep Mystery of What, Actually, Is This Thing?': The Philosopher Inside Google DeepMind
The Guardian, Tuesday, June 30th, 2026
A profile of Iason Gabriel, the moral philosopher whose ethics work shaped frontier AI at DeepMind.
This Guardian profile follows Iason Gabriel, a political philosopher who joined DeepMind, Google's London-based AI lab, in 2017 after a friend suggested he apply.
For a time he was the only active philosopher working at a frontier AI lab, and his background in moral philosophy and political theory gave him an unusual perspective in an engineer-dominated industry. The title comes from his reflection on the deep mystery of what AI systems actually are.
Over the past decade he has built a body of work that tracked and often predicted the ethical challenges created by the surprising success of large language models. The article examines fundamental questions about AI's nature and its ethical implications.