- Google enters the military/government market
- New Pentagon contract authorizes use of Gemini for ‘all lawful purposes’
- Google employees are not happy with the new contract
Google recently expanded its contract with the US Department of Defense (DoD) to provide Gemini for use in classified operations or for “any lawful purpose”, and also withdrew from a $100 million challenge from the Pentagon to build swarms of voice-controlled autonomous drones.
At the same time, the company is facing internal discontent over its decision to supply the Pentagon with Gemini for classified projects, but the company responded by telling staff it was “proud” of the Pentagon’s AI contract.
So how have Google’s ethics and policies evolved over time? And are they changing to allow the company to carve out a very lucrative – if ethically dubious – slice of the government pie?
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Drone Grounding
Google’s abandonment of its once widely recognized motto “Don’t be evil” may be coming true in the eyes of some Google employees, but it’s not the first time the company has changed its policy. The company’s AI principles once stated that the company would not deploy its AI tools where they were “likely to cause harm” and that it would not “design or deploy” AI tools for surveillance or weapons.
The withdrawal of the Pentagon competition to create technology that could turn voice instructions into commands for a swarm of autonomous drones was reported by Google to be a matter of lack of resources, but the real cause is believed to be an internal ethics review. Bloomberg reports.
This suggests, at least, that the internal ethics committee is still functioning and is not completely ineffective.
On the other hand, as the company expands Gemini’s availability to classified networks, the Pentagon is free to use Gemini for “any lawful purpose.” This clause is more bark than bite.
Before the turn of the century, it was illegal for communications providers to install backdoors for law enforcement purposes – but CALEA and the Patriot Act changed all that. Federal law enforcement was also previously prohibited from legally seizing data stored on servers in foreign countries, but the CLOUD Act changed that as well.
Things are only illegal until they’re legal, and vice versa, giving the Pentagon a future-proof loophole if their intended use case were suddenly legalized.
Therefore, the “for lawful purposes” clause provides no meaningful protection against the use of AI for autonomous weapon systems or mass national surveillance, as Anthropic has protested, and is further weakened by the inclusion of a clause in the Google-DoD contract that states the company has “no right to…veto over lawful government operational decision-making.” Something OpenAI also met in its agreement with the Pentagon.
This gives the Pentagon virtually free rein over the direction it chooses to take with Gemini in its classified projects. Mass surveillance has been around for decades, but the goal of AI is simply to make it smarter, more targeted, and more effective.
A slice of Pentagon pie
The appeal of working as a government and military contractor is simple: It involves a lot of money. Before the ink was completely burned on Anthropic’s separation from government use, OpenAI had an extensive and shiny contract to fill exactly the role Anthropic sought to avoid.
Likewise, Microsoft and Amazon have already won numerous contracts involving cloud, AI, and cybersecurity tools, and it appears Google is trying to catch up.
Google employees pose a work ethic challenge with the government. In 2018, protests by Google employees led the company to abandon Project MAVEN due to the use of Google technology to analyze footage of drone attacks. These protests also resulted in the absence of Google’s “do no harm” AI principles.
Google also faced similar dissent when its employees objected to the company’s potential involvement in providing technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
As is tradition, Google employees are once again forming digital pickets, with more than 600 signing a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai asking him to reject any use of Google’s AI technology for military purposes.
In response, Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, wrote in an internal memo seen by The information“We’ve been proud to work with departments of Defense since Google’s early days, and we continue to believe in supporting national security in a thoughtful and responsible manner.”
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