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Google Wants To Work with the Pentagon Again, Despite Employee Concerns

Wednesday November 3, 2021. 08:38 PM , from Slashdot/Apple
Three years after an employee revolt forced Google to abandon work on a Pentagon program that used artificial intelligence, the company is aggressively pursuing a major contract to provide its technology to the military. From a report: The company's plan to land the potentially lucrative contract, known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, could raise a furor among its outspoken work force and test the resolve of management to resist employee demands. In 2018, thousands of Google employees signed a letter protesting the company's involvement in Project Maven, a military program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video images and could be used to refine the targeting of drone strikes. Google management caved and agreed to not renew the contract once it expired.

The outcry led Google to create guidelines for the ethical use of artificial intelligence, which prohibit the use of its technology for weapons or surveillance, and hastened a shake-up of its cloud computing business. Now, as Google positions cloud computing as a key part of its future, the bid for the new Pentagon contract could test the boundaries of those A.I. principles, which have set it apart from other tech giants that routinely seek military and intelligence work.
The military's initiative, which aims to modernize the Pentagon's cloud technology and support the use of artificial intelligence to gain an advantage on the battlefield, is a replacement for a contract with Microsoft that was canceled this summer amid a lengthy legal battle with Amazon. Google did not compete against Microsoft for that contract after the uproar over Project Maven.

The Pentagon's restart of its cloud computing project has given Google a chance to jump back into the bidding, and the company has raced to prepare a proposal to present to Defense officials, according to four people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. In September, Google's cloud unit made it a priority, declaring an emergency 'Code Yellow,' an internal designation of importance that allowed the company to pull engineers off other assignments and focus them on the military project, two of those people said. On Tuesday, the Google cloud unit's chief executive, Thomas Kurian, met with Charles Q. Brown, Jr., the chief of staff of the Air Force, and other top Pentagon officials to make the case for his company, two people said. Google, in a written statement, said it is 'firmly committed to serving our public sector customers' including the Defense Department, and that it 'will evaluate any future bid opportunities accordingly.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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