Chuck DarwinIt was not so long ago that working with the military on potentially harmful technology was seen as a red line for many big tech workers.
In 2018, thousands of #Google employees launched a protest against a program to analyze drone footage for the DoD called #Project #Maven.
“We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” over 3,000 workers stated in an open letter at the time.
Google decided not to renew Project Maven following the protests and published policies that barred pursuing technology that could “cause or directly facilitate injury to people”.
🔥In the years since the Project Maven protest, though, Google has clamped down on employee activism,
removed the 2018 language from its policies that prohibited creating technology for weaponry
and signed numerous contracts that allow militaries to use its products.
⚠️In 2024, the tech giant fired over 50 employees in response to protests against the company’s military ties to the Israeli government.
Chief executive Sundar Pichai sent a memo to employees after the firings stating that Google was a business and not a place to “fight over disruptive issues or debate politics”.
⛔️Google announced just this week that it would provide its Gemini artificial intelligence to provide the military a platform for creating AI agents to work on unclassified projects.
#OpenAI too had a blanket ban on allowing any militaries to access its models prior to 2024,
but since and now has its chief product officer serving as a lieutenant colonel in the US military’s “executive innovation corps”.
🔸The startup, along with Google, Anthropic and xAI, signed an up-to-$200m contract with the DoD last year to integrate its technology into military systems.
💥On the day that Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, OpenAI secured a deal with the DoD allowing its tech to be used in classified military systems.
Elsewhere in the tech industry, more hawkish companies like defense tech firm #Anduril, founded the year before the Google Maven protests, and surveillance tech maker #Palantir have made partnering with the DoD a cornerstone of their businesses
and attempted to sway Silicon Valley politics towards their worldview.
♦️Palantir has been ahead of the curve on working with the military, contracting with military intelligence to map planted explosives in Afghanistan in the early 2010s.
🔸Chief executive Alex Karp published a book last year dedicated in large part to advocating for closer integration of the tech industry and AI with the US military, in one passage accusing the Google workers who protested in 2018 of being nihilists.
👉After Google dropped the Project Maven contract in 2019, Palantir took it over. Maven is now the name of the classified system that military personnel use to access Anthropic’s Claude, according to the Washington Post
