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Google signs AI deal with the Pentagon, ignoring protest from over 600 employees
Key Points
Google has signed a contract letting the Pentagon use its AI models for classified tasks, on the same day over 600 employees protested the deal in an open letter.
Legal experts say the contract's safeguards against mass surveillance and autonomous weapons carry no legal weight, since the agreement explicitly doesn't give Google the right to control or veto government operational decisions.
Unlike OpenAI, which retained full control over its safety stack, Google has committed to adjusting its AI safety filters at the government's request.
Despite an open letter from hundreds of employees, Google has signed a contract giving the U.S. Department of Defense access to its AI models for classified work. Legal experts say the contract's safety clauses aren't legally binding.
Google has signed a contract with the Pentagon that lets the U.S. Department of Defense use Google's AI models for classified tasks, The Information reports, citing a person familiar with the matter. The deal gives the Pentagon access for "any lawful government purpose."
The signing happened on the same day more than 600 Google employees - many from the company's DeepMind AI research lab - sent an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai. They urged him to reject any classified collaboration with the Pentagon. "We want to see AI benefit humanity; not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways," the employees wrote, according to the Washington Post.
Their core argument: classified contracts make it impossible for Google's own representatives to even know how the technology is being used. "The only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms is to reject any classified workloads," the letter states.
A spokesperson for Google Public Sector called the new contract an extension of an existing agreement from November. Google remains committed to the consensus that AI should not be used for "domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight," the spokesperson said.
Legal experts say the contract's safety clauses have no teeth
The contract does include language stating the AI system "is not intended for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons without appropriate human oversight." But it also says, according to The Information: "This Agreement does not confer any right to control or veto lawful Government operational decision-making."
Charlie Bullock, a lawyer and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Law and AI, says the phrasing "is not intended for, and should not be used for" carries no legal weight. It simply signals that such use would be unwelcome, but wouldn't constitute a breach of contract. Amos Toh from NYU's Brennan Center adds, according to The Information, that "appropriate human oversight" doesn't necessarily mean a human has to stand between target identification and a fire order. The Pentagon has not ruled out fully autonomous weapons systems.