{"id":26377,"date":"2026-05-04T07:30:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T07:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/26377\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T07:30:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T07:30:09","slug":"a-new-google-ai-deal-with-the-pentagon-has-sparked-employee-backlash-their-leverage-appears-limited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/26377\/","title":{"rendered":"A new Google AI deal with the Pentagon has sparked employee backlash. Their leverage appears limited"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google<\/a> inks a major contract to help the Pentagon use AI. Hundreds of employees sign an open letter opposing the deal. The company\u2019s leadership initially digs in its heels. Several employees resign in protest. As the employee revolt builds, Google\u2019s management reverses course and opts not to renew the lucrative military relationship.<\/p>\n

That was 2018. Back then, Google was the Pentagon\u2019s partner on Project Maven, a Pentagon initiative that used AI to analyze drone surveillance footage as part of targeting workflows. And employee backlash not only forced the company to give up on Project Maven, it made Google wary of any projects to help the U.S. defense industry. <\/p>\n

Flash forward eight years, and history seems, at first glance, to be repeating itself. Google has followed OpenAI and xAI in agreeing to allow its Gemini AI models to be used inside the U.S. military\u2019s classified networks for \u201cany lawful purpose.\u201d When news of the likely deal leaked, close to 600 employees signed an open letter opposing it. But Google\u2019s leadership has again dug in its heels.<\/p>\n

This time, however, things may out quite differently than they did with Project Maven. Current and former Google employees tell Fortune the leverage that once allowed technology workers to influence significant sway over the company\u2019s policies has eroded. Gone are the days when threats of resignations and a petition signed by thousands were enough to sway Mountain View\u2019s position. <\/p>\n

Unlike with Project Maven, Google can also fall back on the argument that it is hardly the only company to agree to allow its AI models to be used in classified U.S. military systems for \u201cany lawful purpose\u201d\u2014and on the contention that failing to agree to such language could present significant legal and business risks to the company. OpenAI and xAI have both agreed to similar contract terms, as have Nvidia<\/a>, Microsoft<\/a>, and Amazon<\/a>. Only the AI lab Anthropic has refused to agree to these terms, resulting in the Pentagon ordering the military and all defense contractors to stop using Anthropic\u2019s products within the next six months and labeling it a \u201csupply chain risk.\u201d Anthropic has been challenging that designation in court. <\/p>\n

While Google has struck a defiant tone, internal backlash appears to be mounting, with several employees criticizing the deal publicly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI spent the last 2 months trying to prevent this,\u201d Alex Turner, a research scientist at Google DeepMind<\/a>, the unit that builds the company\u2019s Gemini models, said in a post on X.<\/a> \u201cGoogle affirms it can\u2019t veto usage, commits to modify safety filters at government request, and aspirational language with no legal restrictions. Shameful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tensions between tech workers and management over military applications are not new, particularly when AI systems risk being used in warfare, but Google\u2019s own stance has been gradually shifting in ways that alarm critics. In the wake of the Project Maven controversy, for example, Google published a set of AI principles pledging not to develop AI for weapons or for surveillance that violates internationally accepted norms. But, in February 2025, the company updated those principles and removed that explicit pledge from its public website.<\/p>\n

Laura Nolan, a former Google employee who resigned over Project Maven, told Fortune it is unsurprising that employees working on a general-purpose technology, such as AI, would be uneasy about their work contributing to military targeting systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are not people who are necessarily expecting to work at a defense constructor as suddenly they are,\u201d she said. However, she also said that workers today have less influence than they once did, as cost-cutting and layoffs across the tech sector have weakened employee leverage and made collective organizing more difficult. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe companies want to redirect money into AI, and they think that this may even be able to replace engineers,\u201d Nolan said. \u201cStaff in tech have also never been particularly well organized because historically, it\u2019s been a good business to be in and staff have normally been treated very well,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Google also appears to have learnt lessons from the Project Maven controversy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things the company learnt from the Maven incident was they very much started to crack down on internal communication, they decommissioned a lot of the internal mailing lists, and they decommissioned the internal social network,\u201d she said. \u201cIt is harder to organize internally now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The only organized pushback from employees so far is primarily an open letter to management protesting the use of the tech in military situations, which has now amassed around a thousand signatures, according to one Google DeepMind researcher who spoke to Fortune but asked for anonymity to speak freely about their employer. Part of the issue, the researcher said, is that some within the company feel the Pentagon deal fundamentally clashes with DeepMind\u2019s values, and has left employees questioning whether the AI systems they help to build will now be deployed in ways they consider dangerous and cannot see or verify.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a pride in doing AI for good for a very long time,\u201d the researcher said. \u201cSuddenly, the things I\u2019ve pushed to improve might be used in very different ways with not enough oversight to harm people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researcher also said many staff were still unaware of the deal because Google never clearly communicated that it was negotiating\u2014or had signed\u2014the contract. The closest Google has come to responding to employees\u2019 concerns is publishing an internal memo about \u201cresponsible AI\u201d and military partnerships that did not explicitly acknowledge the agreement, they said. The researcher called the lack of transparency around the contract \u201cpretty indicting\u201d for Google and said it felt as if the deal had been done \u201cin the dark.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to use the little leverage that exists to maybe get leadership to sort of maybe at least commit to more transparency,\u201d the researcher said. They added that as AI-driven automation reduces headcounts across the industry, it has become harder to mount the kind of internal pushback that helped kill Google\u2019s Project Maven contract in 2018.<\/p>\n

Representatives for Google did not respond to a request for comment from Fortune by the time of publication. <\/p>\n

Concerns about mass surveillance and autonomous weapons <\/p>\n

The deal\u2014and Google\u2019s decision to push through with it despite strong employee opposition\u2014has put fresh pressure on a question that has dogged the AI industry since Anthropic\u2019s negotiations with the Pentagon publicly collapsed earlier this year: whether AI companies can or should impose meaningful limits on how governments use their technology, especially when it comes to autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, and whether employees have any real power over how the technology they create is used.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The areas of concern around Google\u2019s deal are the same two that have plagued other AI companies: autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. On weapons, critics worry AI could theoretically be used to autonomously identify and select targets without direct human oversight. On surveillance, AI\u2019s ability to aggregate scattered data points into a comprehensive picture of a person\u2019s life is already technically feasible\u2014and, according to legal experts, currently lawful. These experts say this is the case even though several U.S. laws, including the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 2015 USA Freedom Act, and the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution\u2014which protects individual citizens from illegal searches and seizures\u2014would all seemingly prohibit mass surveillance of U.S. citizens. But legal experts say that under existing U.S. law, government authorities can buy commercially available data from brokers and feed it to AI systems, amounting in practice to mass surveillance of Americans.<\/p>\n

While the Google agreement states that the company\u2019s tech \u201cis not intended for,\u201d and \u201cshould not be used for\u201d domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons without appropriate human oversight and control, experts have said <\/a>that it imposes no enforceable obligation on the Pentagon to abide by those limits.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cGiven that we offer general-purpose models and not models that are specifically trained or evaluated for such purposes, there are huge risks,\u201d the Google researcher said. \u201cWith mass surveillance, it\u2019s very clear that this is really dangerous, and we just don\u2019t have the laws or the regulations.\u201d<\/p>\n

He noted that current large language models like Gemini are not yet suited to run on weapons systems directly as they are too slow and too large to be embedded in something like a drone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, he said the issue is around the precedent these \u201call lawful purposes\u201d contracts set for future, more capable systems. He argued Google\u2019s agreement risks normalising a model in which companies hand over powerful, general\u2011purpose AI to the Pentagon with few meaningful constraints, making it much harder to roll back or tighten those terms later.<\/p>\n

Weaker guardrails on military AI<\/p>\n

Google is not the first AI company to sign a Pentagon deal that critics say falls short on these two issues, but legal experts say its contract appears to be the most permissive yet.<\/p>\n

Following Anthropic\u2019s rupture with the Department of War over its refusal to sign a contract that included the \u201call lawful purposes\u201d language that the Pentagon has been insisting on, both OpenAI and Elon Musk\u2019s xAI both inked deals with the Pentagon that allowed their tech to be deployed for \u201call lawful use\u201d by the government. OpenAI\u2019s decision, coming after it has stated publicly that it supported Anthropic\u2019s red lines too, sparked employee dissent within OpenAI, led to customer boycotts of ChatGPT, and caused at least one senior employee to resign from the AI lab. The backlash was so widespread that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman later publicly apologized for the \u201csloppy and opportunistic\u201d deal and said the company will re-negotiate parts of the deal.<\/p>\n

In comparison to OpenAI, Google\u2019s deal hasn\u2019t had quite the same level of scrutiny, even within the company.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people actually aren\u2019t even aware of the letter because there is no internal communication about this at all,\u201d the Google researcher said. \u201cWith all the blowback against OpenAI, this is just a hope that people have moved on and this is the new normal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Legal experts have said that the language in Google\u2019s deal appears to be less restrictive and more permissive of government use than OpenAI\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe OpenAI contract seemed like it did give some kind of contractual guarantee that the models weren\u2019t going to [be] used for certain kinds of mass domestic surveillance,\u201d Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow on LawAI\u2019s U.S. Law and Policy team, told Fortune. \u201cEven that contractual guarantee is not present in Google\u2019s deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bullock added that under Google\u2019s terms, if there are technical safeguards within the models that prevent the government from doing something it wants to do, Google is obliged to step in and remove those safeguards. The government can do whatever it wants, as long as it\u2019s lawful, according to Bullock\u2019s assessment of the contract, whereas OpenAI\u2019s contract appeared to lack the language about removing and adjusting safety settings from filters.<\/p>\n

However he also noted that, unlike Google, OpenAI had published a smaller portion of its contract with the Pentagon and these assurances may be undermined in other places.<\/p>\n

Se\u00e1n \u00d3 h\u00c9igeartaigh, a research professor at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, said the Google agreement appeared \u201cstrictly weaker\u201d than OpenAI\u2019s on the available evidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom a legal perspective, it looks less strong and thus more concerning,\u201d he said, adding that it was \u201cdisappointing\u201d that Google\u2019s deal had not attracted the same level of public discourse and internal debate as OpenAI\u2019s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Google inks a major contract to help the Pentagon use AI. Hundreds of employees sign an open letter…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,53,625,2408,132,1429,7543,820,157,1545,388,5008],"class_list":{"0":"post-26377","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-google","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-anthropic","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-gemini","12":"tag-google","13":"tag-google-ai","14":"tag-google-deepmind","15":"tag-labor","16":"tag-openai","17":"tag-organized-labor","18":"tag-pentagon","19":"tag-u-s-military"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26377","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=26377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}