About 560 Google employees are calling in an open letter their top boss to prevent the US Department of Defense from using the tech group’s AI systems for confidential military purposes.
“We want AI to benefit humanity, we do not want it to be used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways,” said the letter sent to CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday. “This includes lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, but also goes beyond that.”
Many signatories work for Google’s AI branch DeepMind. They say they are very concerned. “As people working on AI, we know that these systems can centralize power and that they make mistakes. We believe that our involvement with this technology comes with a responsibility to expose and prevent its most unethical and dangerous uses.” Eighteen members of senior management also signed the letter, the British newspaper said Financial Times.
Too late
The letter from the employees may arrive too late. Technology news site The Information reports on Tuesday that Google and the Pentagon have already signed a contract. It would state that the Pentagon may use AI from Google within secret systems. Although the contract would not cover use for domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons, the contract states that Google does not have the right to restrict or block “lawful operational decision-making” by the government.
It was precisely that formulation that was central to the feud between AI company Anthropic and the Trump administration this year. The Defense Department demanded that the company provide unrestricted access to its models for “all lawful purposes.” According to Anthropic, that would allow use for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.
When Anthropic tried to prevent the latter by demanding additional safety guarantees, the Trump administration suspended all contracts with the company. The judge is now assessing whether the government acted within the law.
The question is what exactly this and future American administrations mean by “lawful purposes.” Trump threatened to bomb “all bridges and energy facilities” in Iran – a move that many legal experts say would amount to a war crime. The long series of American attacks on boats of suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean are also contrary to international law, according to critics.
Google employees have had success in the past in opposing cooperation with the U.S. military. In 2018, thousands of employees signed a petition against Google’s participation in the Pentagon’s Maven project, which used artificial intelligence to identify objects in drone footage. The contract for this between Google and the Pentagon was subsequently not extended.
