Over 600 Google Employees Urge Rejecting DoD AI Deal

More than 600 Google employees, including senior leaders from its DeepMind AI lab and Cloud division, sent a letter to Chief Executive Sundar Pichai on Monday urging the company to reject a proposed deal with the U.S. Department of Defense that would allow its Gemini AI models to be used in classified military settings.

The letter, signed by workers across Alphabet divisions with more than 20 directors, senior directors, and vice presidents among them, warns that classified networks prevent Google from monitoring how its technology might be applied. "As people working on AI, we know that these systems can centralize power and that they do make mistakes," the employees wrote. They argued that the only way to avoid association with harms such as lethal autonomous weapons or mass surveillance is to decline all classified workloads, as such uses could occur without the company's knowledge or ability to intervene.

The pushback comes amid reports that Google is negotiating terms with the Pentagon to extend Gemini's deployment beyond existing nonclassified contracts, such as the genAI.mil platform available to defense personnel. Organizers said Google has proposed contractual limits on...