Fired Google AI Engineer’s whistleblower lawsuit moves ahead

Google lost a bid to dismiss a lawsuit by an engineer who claims he was fired for challenging a paper the company published that touted the ability of artificial intelligence to speed the design of computer chips.

In a tentative ruling Wednesday, a California state judge rejected the Alphabet Inc. unit’s request to throw out Satrajit Chatterjee’s wrongful termination and whistleblower protection claims. Chatterjee is at least the third researcher to be ousted by Google after butting heads with the company over the use of AI.

Before Chatterjee was fired in March 2022, he was a senior engineering manager whose responsibilities included evaluating a chip design initiative called Project Morpheus.

His dispute with Google followed its publication of a scientific paper in the journal Nature in April 2020 which claimed the company’s AI programs could design computer chips faster than humans.

Chatterjee and his team conducted further research which he claims convinced him that Google’s paper misrepresented the ability of the company’s proprietary technology.

After presenting his findings to Google supervisors, he was fired “because he allegedly threatened to disclose his suspicions of fraud to the CEO and the board,” according to the court’s summary of the complaint.

In his ruling, Superior Court Judge Frederick Chung in San Jose said Chatterjee adequately supported his claim that Google terminated him in retaliation for refusing to participate in an act that would violate state or federal law.

Google argued that Chatterjee’s allegations and reports of fraud are academic disputes and “a disagreement between scientists over the better way to design computer chips,” rendering them an internal matter.

“This argument presupposes, however, that internal personnel matters and disclosures of suspected or actual unlawful conduct are always mutually exclusive,” Chung wrote.

Chatterjee claims that Google, by hyping its AI research, was attempting to defraud shareholders and the public.

The court’s website indicates that Google can contest the tentative ruling at a hearing Thursday before the judge issues a final decision. Google previously won dismissal of other claims in the case.

Google didn’t respond outside regular business hours to a request for comment.

The case is Chatterjee v. Google LLC, 22CV398683, California Superior Court, Santa Clara County (San Jose).