{"id":25070,"date":"2026-05-02T04:03:56","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T04:03:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/25070\/"},"modified":"2026-05-02T04:03:56","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T04:03:56","slug":"google-workers-seek-red-lines-on-military-a-i-echoing-anthropic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/25070\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Workers Seek \u2018Red Lines\u2019 on Military A.I., Echoing Anthropic"},"content":{"rendered":"

The standoff<\/a> between the Pentagon and Anthropic<\/a> over artificial intelligence is reverberating across Silicon Valley, spurring debates among employees at other companies about the government\u2019s use of the technology they build.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, more than 100 employees who work on Google\u2019s artificial intelligence technology signed a letter sent to management expressing concern about the company\u2019s plan to work with the Pentagon and calling on Google to draw the same red lines in its government contracts that Anthropic is seeking.<\/p>\n

The employees signed onto a letter saying they did not want Google to allow the U.S. military to use its Gemini A.I. product to surveil American citizens or pilot autonomous weapons without human involvement. The letter was sent to Jeff Dean, the chief scientist of the company\u2019s A.I. division, Google DeepMind.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlease do everything in your power to stop any deal which crosses these basic red lines,\u201d the employees wrote. \u201cWe love working at Google and want to be proud of our work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The letter illustrates how the Pentagon\u2019s pressure on Anthropic could backfire with other A.I. companies, including Google<\/a> and OpenAI. Over the past few weeks, the Defense Department, which has a $200 million contract with Anthropic, has been pressing to be able to use the start-up\u2019s A.I. models as the military sees fit. Anthropic has resisted agreeing to those terms because it wants assurances that the technology won\u2019t be used for mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons that have no human involvement.<\/p>\n

On the same day that Mr. Dean received his letter, nearly 50 OpenAI employees and 175 Google employees published a public letter<\/a> criticizing the Pentagon\u2019s negotiating tactics and calling on its leaders to \u201cput aside their differences and stand together to continue to refuse the Department of War\u2019s current demands.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in,\u201d the letter said.<\/p>\n

Mr. Dean, who is one of Google\u2019s most influential software engineers, has expressed solidarity with Anthropic. He said this week that he opposed government use of A.I. to surveil Americans.<\/p>\n

\u201cMass surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment and has a chilling effect on freedom of expression,\u201d Mr. Dean wrote in a social media post. \u201cSurveillance systems are prone to misuse for political or discriminatory purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Google and Mr. Dean did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

By appealing to Mr. Dean, DeepMind and other A.I. employees are hoping that they can influence Google\u2019s agreement with the Pentagon, which it is close to sealing. Google has sought to quell employee activism in recent years after a plan to work with the Pentagon in 2018 caused an employee uprising<\/a> and led the company to discontinue its contract<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Google has centralized its decision-making process around those contracts since then. It also has rolled back some of its A.I. safety procedures<\/a> as it tries to keep pace with upstarts like OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n

Some of the company\u2019s nearly 200,000 employees still speak out about issues. More than 800 petitioned management<\/a> this month to be transparent about how Google\u2019s technology supports federal immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n

A footnote in the A.I. letter to Mr. Dean said many of the signees opposed \u201cwarrantless surveillance of any citizens of the world.\u201d But they decided to exclude that from the letter \u201cto increase the probability of achieving our request.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The standoff between the Pentagon and Anthropic over artificial intelligence is reverberating across Silicon Valley, spurring debates among…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1556,25,16950,5044,16952,1553,1557,132,7543,1153,16951,52,16949,1551],"class_list":{"0":"post-25070","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-google","8":"tag-anthropic-ai-llc","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-dean","11":"tag-deepmind","12":"tag-deepmind-technologies-ltd","13":"tag-defense-contracts","14":"tag-defense-department","15":"tag-google","16":"tag-google-deepmind","17":"tag-google-inc","18":"tag-jeff-1968","19":"tag-research","20":"tag-surveillance-of-citizens-by-government","21":"tag-united-states-defense-and-military-forces"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25070","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=25070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}