Microsoft employees ask general manager Satya Nadella not to work on military technology

by Joshua Brustein and Dina Bass

A group of employees from Microsoft Corp. demand that the company abandon a $ 480 million contract with the US military to build versions of its HoloLens augmented reality helmets for the battlefield, the latest in a series of protests from corporate workers technological opposition to certain uses. products that they build.

"We are alarmed by the fact that Microsoft is working to provide military technology to the US military, thus helping the government of a country to" increase lethality "with the tools we have built," the workers said. in a letter that started circulating in the company on Friday. "We did not register to develop weapons and we ask for our opinion on how our work is used." The authors did not identify themselves. By the end of Friday, more than 100 employees had signed the letter.

The letter, addressed to Satya Nadella, chief executive of Microsoft, and Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer of the company, comes a few days before Microsoft plans to introduce the second version of HoloLens, a head-mounted device that projects digital images world. Microsoft has generally described HoloLens as a productivity tool for professionals in areas such as architecture and engineering, or as an entertainment device. He has already worked with US and Israeli military forces for training applications but, as the letter points out, "he never crossed the line" in weapons development.

In addition to canceling the contract, employees are asking Microsoft to issue a policy explicitly outlining the acceptable uses of its products and to appoint an independent ethics committee to enforce it.

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The retreat of technology workers from several companies has raised concerns within the government, which would be unable to keep up with the rapid pace of technological development in areas such as artificial intelligence. Smith emphasized the need for the United States to have access to updated technology when it addressed these concerns. In a blog post, he said the company would continue to sell software to the US military, but employees with ethical scruples could move on to different projects. In their letter, Microsoft employees said that this decision was insufficient because it "ignores the problem that workers are not properly informed about the use of their work". The company referred to this blog article in its response Friday to the letter.

"We always appreciate employee feedback and have many ways to make their voices heard," a Microsoft spokesman said in a statement. "We have heard a lot of employees throughout the fall. As we said at the time, we are committed to providing our technology to the US Department of Defense, which includes the US military under this contract. As we have said, we will continue to be an active corporate citizen in the face of ethical and public policy issues related to artificial intelligence and the military. "

Microsoft won the contract in November, as announced for the first time Bloomberg News. It is intended to "increase lethality by improving the ability to detect, decide and engage in front of the enemy", according to a description of the program made by the government. The devices would likely incorporate features not included in the civilian version. In a document shared with companies bidding for the contract, the Army said it wanted the devices to include night vision and thermal detection, as well as a technology that could be used to monitor concussions. This could eventually lead the army to buy more than 100,000 helmets, which would exceed the total number of HoloLens helmets sold to date.

Internal opposition has become a persistent problem for mainstream technology companies seeking to sell products for the armed forces and law enforcement. Protests have erupted in large corporations such as Google and Amazon.com Inc. of Alphabet Inc., as well as in smaller startups. Last year, a petition from Google staff pushed the company to withdraw from a Pentagon deal that could have reached $ 250 million.

Last year, hundreds of Microsoft workers signed a petition criticizing a contract with the US Immigration and Customs Service. In October, a blog post allegedly written by Microsoft employees urged the company not to bid for a multi-billion dollar cloud computing deal.