Google staff urge chief executive to block US military AI use

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More than 560 Google employees have signed an open letter to chief executive Sundar Pichai urging him to refuse to let the US government use its AI technology for classified military operations.

“We want to see AI benefit humanity, not being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways,” read the letter, which was sent to Pichai on Monday. “This includes lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, but extends beyond.”

“The only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms is to reject any classified workloads,” it continued. “Otherwise, such uses may occur without our knowledge or the power to stop them.”

Big tech companies are under pressure to take a stance on military and intelligence use of their AI products after a clash between the Pentagon and AI start-up Anthropic.

Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei refused to give the government unfettered access to its models and insisted on guardrails to prevent them being used for lethal autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. 

In response, Anthropic was designated a supply-chain risk and President Donald Trump ordered that all government departments stop using its Claude chatbot. Anthropic has challenged the designation in court.

Alphabet staff are responding to reports that Google is close to agreeing terms with the Department of Defense that will allow its Gemini model to be used in classified operations without the formal safeguards that Anthropic demanded.

“This isn’t just about the military, AI-powered mass surveillance is a direct threat to American civil liberties,” said one person involved in the campaign, who asked to remain anonymous. “This is not low-risk and theoretical; we are already in these fights. We see AI being used to support authoritarianism in China.”

The letter to Pichai was co-ordinated by staff at DeepMind, Google’s AI lab, said two of the people involved. Two-fifths of signatories work in the AI division, with a similar share in the Cloud unit and the rest across Alphabet.

More than 18 senior staff — including principals, directors and vice-presidents — have signed, they added. About two-thirds chose to be named, with the rest deciding to remain anonymous.

DeepMind’s chief scientist Jeff Dean has been the most vocal executive on the issue so far. In February, he posted on X that “Mass surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment and has a chilling effect on freedom of expression.” He added that he still backed a 2018 commitment to ban lethal autonomous weapons.

Google has faced previous protests against its military ties. In 2018, several staff quit and thousands signed a petition against Project Maven, which used AI to improve drone strikes. Google did not renew the contract and pledged not to work on AI for weapons or surveillance.

However, last year it quietly dropped that stance in an update of its AI Principles, deleting language that promised not to pursue “weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people”.

Co-founder Demis Hassabis explained the decision by saying that the world has changed since Google acquired DeepMind in 2014. Multiple frontier models are now widely available and US tech companies have a duty to help the country defend itself.

“We take a lot of inspiration from what happened before, with the anti-Maven protest, and the fact that many senior leaders share these views,” said a second person involved in the letter. “There is almost total consensus against the programme in DeepMind.”

OpenAI faced a backlash from its researchers after striking its own deal with the government soon after the Anthropic ban. Chief executive Sam Altman later apologised, calling his actions “opportunistic and sloppy”.

“Making the wrong call right now would cause irreparable damage to Google’s reputation, business, and role in the world,” the letter concludes. “We know from our own history that our leaders can make the right choices, for ourselves and for the world, when the stakes are high.”