Overview
- More than 600 Google workers sent an open letter Monday urging CEO Sundar Pichai to refuse classified Pentagon workloads for the company’s AI.
- The letter cites a report that Google is negotiating to run its Gemini model on secure Defense Department systems, with some outlets now saying the deal is finalized.
- Signatories include staff from DeepMind and Cloud and more than 20 senior leaders, and they seek transparency on existing DoD work and a permanent ethics board with employee seats.
- Workers warn that classified, air-gapped deployments are opaque, which would block auditing and could enable uses like mass surveillance or lethal autonomous weapons.
- The push comes as the Pentagon favors “all lawful uses” language in contracts, after its clash with Anthropic over use limits, and as OpenAI and Microsoft already support classified military workloads while Google expands unclassified genAI.mil work.