Morning Edition · Tuesday, July 28, 2026Published at 1:31 AM EDT · New York

Hassabis Says DeepMind Sold to Google Because Independence Would Have Cost Billions It Could Not Raise

The DeepMind co-founder says staying independent would have required around $7 billion at a time the lab struggled to raise millions, a decade before AI became a trillion-dollar contest.

DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis says the lab had no realistic choice but to sell to Google, according to comments summarized by AI Post. He argues that pursuing artificial general intelligence independently would have required roughly $7…