In the autumn of 2015, DeepMind proposed building an app for the Royal Free Hospital in a spirit closer to a research mission than a commercial contract. Nine years on, DeepMind's co-founder has stepped back from running the company, handing day-to-day control to a Google veteran based in California. The Streams app that emerged from the partnership went on to breach the Data Protection Act. In 2017 the Information Commissioner's Office found that 1.6 million patient records had been shared with DeepMind without adequate consent or a proper legal basis. DeepMind had promised patients their data would never be connected to Google accounts, but a year later that promise dissolved when DeepMind Health was folded into the parent company, and by September 2019 the transfer to Google Health was complete. The lesson was that a mission-led pitch carries no binding force once the commercial logic of the parent company reasserts itself. Hassabis's move to chair, and the appointment of Koray Kavukcuoglu as the operational head, has been read as the end of DeepMind's status as an independent actor within Alphabet, driven by competitive pressure from Anthropic and OpenAI. This confirms that founder charisma and stated ethical commitments are not durable contractual protections. This lands at an awkward moment for NHS technology policy, as the Federated Data Platform, built with Palantir, has drawn criticism over the concentration of sensitive patient data with a single external contractor.