WASHINGTON, United States: More than 600 Google employees demanded on Monday that the company reject a proposed Pentagon deal that would allow its artificial intelligence technology to be deployed in classified military operations, a statement said.
The letter, addressed to Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and signed by workers from Google DeepMind, Cloud, and other divisions, comes as the tech giant is in active negotiations with the US Department of Defense to deploy its flagship Gemini AI model in classified settings.
More than 20 directors, senior directors and vice presidents were among the signatories, the statement said.
“Classified workloads are by definition opaque,” one organizing employee, who was not named in the statement, said. “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.”
Google is one of several companies vying to fill the void left by AI startup Anthropic and become the next go-to provider for government AI in classified and unclassified settings.
Anthropic has sued the Pentagon over its designation of the firm as a “supply-chain risk” after the AI company requested that its technology not be used for mass surveillance in the United States or for automated warfare.
According to the letter organisers, Google has proposed contractual language that would prevent Gemini from being used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons without appropriate human control.
The Pentagon, however, has pushed for broad “all lawful uses” wording that it argues is necessary to maintain operational flexibility.
