Overview
- More than 600 Google employees, including many from DeepMind, signed a letter urging Sundar Pichai to prohibit all classified Pentagon workloads using the company’s AI.
- Alphabet’s global affairs chief Kent Walker told staff that Google will keep supporting defense agencies responsibly and said its AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons without human oversight.
- Workers argued that once Gemini runs on secret military systems, Google loses the ability to track how it is used and the technology could aid mass surveillance or lethal autonomous weapons.
- The flare-up follows Google’s 2023 rollback of internal bans on AI for weapons and surveillance and a December agreement that let the Pentagon use Gemini for unclassified tasks.
- Recent reporting points to a classified-use expansion and a broader industry turn toward Defense work, with rivals like OpenAI also pursuing Pentagon AI contracts.