Employees of Google’s DeepMind artificial-intelligence lab are revolting over their company’s work with militaries, particularly those of the U.S. and Israel. Time reported today on a letter that 200 DeepMind employees signed three months ago urging Google to drop those contracts.
Time did not publish the letter in full but characterized its contents:
“Any involvement with military and weapon manufacturing impacts our position as leaders in ethical and responsible AI, and goes against our mission statement and stated AI Principles,” the letter that circulated inside Google DeepMind says. (Those principles state the company will not pursue applications of AI that are likely to cause “overall harm,” contribute to weapons or other technologies whose “principal purpose or implementation” is to cause injury, or build technologies “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”) The letter says its signatories are concerned with “ensuring that Google’s AI Principles are upheld,” and adds: “We believe [DeepMind’s] leadership shares our concerns.”
Time also points out that the letter seems to refer to previous reports in the magazine that Google provides AI services to Israel’s defense ministry for target selection and also sells cloud services to Israeli defense contractors.
The situation is reminiscent of the blowup over Google’s involvement in Project Maven, a Pentagon AI contract that it exited in 2019, one year after a mass revolt inside the company. Their concerns then were similar to those expressed in the letter Time reported on today. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” Google staffers wrote in a 2018 letter to CEO Sundar Pichai. (The Pentagon’s AI center later pushed back on their characterizations of the program, pointing out that Project Maven was not a weapons project.)
But it’s no longer 2018, and the objections that Google staffers made six years ago sound even more fanciful considering the global crisis we’re in. Russia is on the march against Ukraine. Iran wages war on Israel. And China sharpens its knives for a potential fight over Taiwan. (Meanwhile, these regimes are deepening their coordination with one another.) Whereas Google’s rejection of Project Maven was squarely within the mainstream of elite center-left circles at the time, things have obviously changed.
It’s in this context that Palantir is getting sympathetic writeups in mainstream outlets like Time — for its close coordination with the Ukrainian military on AI-powered targeting and other functions — and the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. “[Palantir CEO Alex] Karp does not believe in appeasement. ‘You scare the crap out of your adversaries,’ he said. He brims with American chauvinism, boasting that we are leagues ahead of China and Russia on software,” she wrote in a recent column.
Palantir chooses America and the West. There’s no fence-sitting there. Karp told Dowd: “I’m not apologizing for giving our product to Ukraine or Israel or lots of other places.”
Will Google? Today’s report in Time notes: “The signatures represent some 5% of DeepMind’s overall headcount—a small portion to be sure, but a significant level of worker unease for an industry where top machine learning talent is in high demand.”
Unlike six years ago, favoring the West over its enemies is now more acceptable in the tech world, though this is more the case in some places than others. The factors that prompted Google to back out of Project Maven just aren’t as strong today. That’s a good thing. American businesses really ought to pick a side, and the right one.