Bloomberg spoke with three employees involved in organizing the letter, all of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. The organizers shared some of those names for verification purposes, but Bloomberg wasn\u2019t able to vet the entire list.<\/p>\n
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A spokesperson for Google didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
The protest letter follows closely a legal imbroglio between the Pentagon and Anthropic PBC over the use of AI for military applications. The Pentagon is seeking to eject Anthropic and its Claude AI tool from US defense supply chains and is casting around for new tech giant AI partners.<\/p>\n
The workforce protest marks a new effort by workers in Silicon Valley to try to curtail the use of AI and the risks associated with such tools in classified national security settings. The Pentagon is seeking to pour billions of dollars into expanding military usage of AI and developing autonomous weapons.<\/p>\n
Google employees were among the first to sound the alarm about the risks of AI warfare in 2018 and force the company to limit its defense work. But the company\u2019s ties to the US defense industry have been re-established in recent years, and it has watered down its own AI red lines.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to see AI benefit humanity, not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways. This includes lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance but extends beyond,\u201d the letter states.<\/p>\n
\u201cCurrently, the only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms is to reject any classified workloads. Otherwise, such uses may occur without our knowledge or the power to stop them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sofia Liguori, an AI research engineer at Google DeepMind in the UK, said she signed the letter because she believes Google has failed to discuss with workers any concrete red lines about usage of its AI on classified or other networks. In addition, she believes it would be impossible for the company to monitor and limit how its AI tools are actually used on \u201cair-gapped\u201d classified systems \u2014 isolated from the public internet or other unsecured networks.<\/p>\n
Liguori, a trained theoretical physicist from near Milan, said the main response to worker concerns about the US military\u2019s use of Google AI has been to encourage the workforce to trust company leadership to sign good contracts.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it\u2019s all left very broad,\u201d she said. \u201cAgentic AI is particularly concerning because of the level of independence it can get to. It\u2019s like giving away a very powerful tool at the same time as giving up on any kind of control on its usage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Organizers said signatories of the letter include more than 20 directors, senior directors, and vice presidents, in addition to a number of senior employees at Google DeepMind, the company\u2019s AI research laboratory that seeks to keep Google at the cutting edge of the AI race while unlocking applications that could benefit humanity.<\/p>\n
A protest in 2018 by Google workers over the company\u2019s work with the US military marked a previous high point of tension between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. The employees said they were appalled to learn that Google had signed on to work on what they termed \u201cthe business of war\u201d under Project Maven, a Pentagon effort to use AI to detect and analyze objects on drone video feeds.<\/p>\n
In the face of protests and resignations, the company ultimately introduced new AI principles and decided against renewing its contract for Project Maven. But last year, Google removed a passage from its artificial intelligence principles that pledged to avoid using the technology in potentially harmful applications, such as weapons.<\/p>\n
The organizers of Monday\u2019s letter said in a statement that \u201cMaven is not over.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWorkers are going to continue organizing against the weaponization of Google\u2019s AI technology until the company draws clear, enforceable lines,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n
In recent years, Google has strengthened its ties with the Pentagon.<\/p>\n
In March, for instance, the company made available its Gemini AI agents for the Pentagon\u2019s three million-strong workforce at the unclassified level, after previously making available its Gemini chatbot in December.<\/p>\n
Emil Michael, the under secretary of defense for research and engineering, told Bloomberg in March that the Pentagon would start with unclassified usage of Google\u2019s Gemini agents and \u201cthen we\u2019ll get to classified and top secret.\u201d He added that talks with Google over using the company\u2019s AI agents on the classified cloud were already underway.<\/p>\n
In April, the Information, a publication focused on the technology industry, subsequently reported that negotiations are underway between Google and the Pentagon for \u201call lawful uses\u201d of the company\u2019s AI tools. That description falls short of red lines cited by leadership at rival Anthropic, which worried all lawful use could feasibly include using AI on fully autonomous weapons systems and for domestic mass surveillance.<\/p>\n
The Pentagon strongly contested such characterizations and argued commercial companies shouldn\u2019t be able to dictate usage policies during wartime or preparations for war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bloomberg spoke with three employees involved in organizing the letter, all of whom requested anonymity for fear of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19615,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,148,13927,1221,13928,13929,779,13930,700,13931,132,1429,597,2510,963,13932,13933,781,134,13934],"class_list":{"0":"post-19614","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-google","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-business-news","10":"tag-central-europe","11":"tag-computing","12":"tag-e-u","13":"tag-emea","14":"tag-eu","15":"tag-euro-members","16":"tag-europe","17":"tag-european","18":"tag-google","19":"tag-google-ai","20":"tag-government","21":"tag-industries","22":"tag-information-technology","23":"tag-poland","24":"tag-polish","25":"tag-tech","26":"tag-technology","27":"tag-warsaw"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}