More than 600 Google employees signed a letter, published Monday, which calls on the group’s management to renounce providing the American army with its artificial intelligence (AI) models for classified operations.
According to the website The Information, the Alphabet subsidiary is currently in discussions with the Pentagon regarding its AI.
Several company executives are among the signatories, according to a statement consulted by AFP.
“As it stands, there is no way to ensure that our tools will not be used to cause terrible damage or curtail individual freedoms, out of sight,” commented one of the employees, whose name was not revealed, in the statement.
The Ministry of Defense is seeking to diversify its AI while it still depends, for the moment, on that of Anthropic, with which it is in dispute.
At the end of February, the Trump government decreed the termination of all contracts linking it to the Californian start-up, a decision contested in court by Anthropic.
It then agreed with OpenAI to integrate its models into classified operations, but the process is expected to take several months.
Like Anthropic, Google has requested that its AI cannot be used for mass surveillance in the United States or for deadly attacks.
But the government considers that it is sufficient for it to commit to acting within the framework of the law.
Google is already a service provider to the Ministry of Defense, but for unclassified activities.
In 2018, an internal movement pushed the group to give up participating in the Maven project, which relied on AI to analyze images collected by drones.
