The employees cite risks of misuse, lack of oversight, and potential harm to civilians.
More than 600 employees at Google have called on the company to abandon a potential agreement with the United States Department of War that would expand the use of its artificial intelligence tools into classified military operations, according to a statement released Monday.
The appeal, addressed to Chief Executive Sundar Pichai, was signed by staff across multiple units, including DeepMind and Cloud, and includes more than 20 individuals in senior leadership roles. It comes as the company is in discussions with US defense officials over deploying its Gemini AI system in sensitive, restricted environments.
Workers behind the initiative warned that the nature of classified programs makes meaningful oversight impossible. “Classified workloads are by definition opaque,” one organizing employee, who was not named in the statement, told AFP. “Right now, there's no way to ensure that our tools wouldn't be leveraged to cause terrible harms or erode civil liberties away from public scrutiny. We're talking about things like profiling individuals or targeting innocent civilians.”
The proposed deal would build on Google’s existing collaboration with the Pentagon under the genAI.mil program, which currently focuses on non-classified applications. Extending those capabilities into classified domains has raised concern among employees who argue that internal safeguards cannot be reliably enforced once the technology is handed over. (more...)
600+ Google employees protest Gemini AI use in Pentagon ops
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