Google abandons its offer for a major military cloud computing contract despite pressure from employees

Google has dropped the competition for a cloud computing project on the Pentagon that could be worth up to $ 10 billion and last up to ten years, evoking a possible conflict with its market values. business, reported Monday Bloomberg.

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project, which involves the massive transfer of data previously processed by defense contractors to a commercial competitor, offers a payout potential large enough to attract the attention of giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Offers are due in less than a week on October 12th. However, Bloomberg said Google now chooses not to continue the contract because it could violate their "AI principles" only months after deciding not to renew a separate Pentagon contract for visualization. of drone images titled Project Maven:

Google's announcement on Monday was made just months after the company decided not to renew its contract with the Pentagon's artificial intelligence program, after many protests from the Internet giant's employees who wanted to work with the army. The company then published a set of principles to evaluate the type of artificial intelligence projects it would pursue.

"We are not bidding for the JEDI contract because, firstly, we could not make sure it would be consistent with our principles of artificial intelligence," said a Google spokesman in a statement. "And secondly, we determined that certain parts of the contract were outside the scope of the current government certifications."

Bloomberg added that a Google spokesman had said that several companies, including Microsoft, International Business Machines Corp. and Oracle Corp., had attempted to split the contract into several parts. She could have "offered a convincing solution for part of the contract". . "

The decision to withdraw from the Maven project was made after thousands of employees signed a petition demanding the company stop working with the army, with many employees having resigned in protest. Sources told Gizmodo that Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud, described the problem as a major headache for management. Although Maven has limited value for the company, Google executives would have seen it as a gateway to lucrative defense contracts involving projects such as surveillance systems that can monitor entire cities.

The JEDI project could have been used to support combat operations, raising even more ethical red flags. Earlier this year, Defense One announced that Google co-founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai had helped spark the Pentagon's interest in cloud computing, even though the company did not signed a discreet contract, fearing a strong reaction from employees. The site explained that JEDI would essentially place Google staff in a potentially ethically compromising position of providing de facto combat support to the US military:

The Department of Defense's cloud computing needs are directly related to its highly interconnected war ambitions in the air, maritime, land, space and cyberspace fields. This cloud provider will help the armed forces to achieve their goals and execute their missions more efficiently and much faster, even if the cloud is not officially involved in the selection or engagement of targets, a task that the Pentagon continues to pursue. 'ensure. the foreseeable future.

Air Force Chief of Staff David Goldfein said in March that "we are looking to the future and we are discussing not only the how to connect systems, connect computers to the tactical tip – most of the topics we are talking about are: standalone computers – we have a real opportunity to ask,How do we connect them? '… how can we speed up decision-making to the point where humans only do what they have to do?'

In a statement to Bloomberg, the Tech Workers Coalition said the "sustained" pressure from employees opposed to Google's participation in JEDI showed that workers "have significant power and are increasingly willing to use it. ".

It is generally believed that the suitor for this contract is Amazon, which has already signed a $ 600 million contract with the CIA. As the Washington Post wrote, Amazon is also one of the only large companies to support a unique approach to the winning call for proposals process. Competitors complained that it could essentially give it a monopoly on cloud computing contracts for the military. to come up.