40
BloombergBusinessweek November 25, 2019In earlyNovember severaldozenexpertsfrom the
Americanmilitaryindustrialcomplex—includingsenior
officers,defensecontractingexecutives,andthinktank
advisers—gatheredata hotela fewblocksfromtheCapitol
todiscussartificialintelligencesoftware.Whileeveryoneate
lunch,GeneralJackShanahan,headoftheJointArtificial
IntelligenceCenter—JAIC,orthe“Jake,”asit’sknown—sat
onstageinhisdressuniformandchattedwithtwocivilians
insuits:EricSchmidt,Google’sformerchiefexecutiveoffi-
cer,andKentWalker,itschieflegalofficer.
Theappearancewitha high-rankingmilitaryofficerwas
a coupforGoogle.Overtheprevioustwoyears,thecom-
panyanditsparent,AlphabetInc.,havebeencriticized
relentlesslyforbeinginsufficientlypatriotic.Itsperceived
infractions:One,the 2017 decisiontoopenanartificialintel-
ligencelabinBeijingwhenmanyintheU.S.hadcometosee
thedevelopmentofAIasa nationalpriorityonparwiththe
ManhattanProject.Two,the 2018 decision,inthefaceof
pressurefromemployees,towithdrawfromProjectMaven,
a secretgovernment program to use commercial AI software
to analyze images from military drones.
In March, General Joseph Dunford Jr., the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, complained to a Senate panel that
Google was “indirectly benefiting the Chinese military.”
Then in July, Peter Thiel, President Trump’s most prominent
Silicon Valley supporter, called Google “seemingly treason-
ous” and suggested it had been infiltrated by Chinese spies.
The following day, Trump more or less endorsed this view,
praising Thiel on Twitter and promising an investigation.
(The administration walked this back later, saying it had no
concerns about Google’s work in China.)
There was a time when Google might have worn its unpop-
ularity in Washington as a badge of honor. But the company
is hitting middle age now, with $140 billion in annual revenue
and a desire to expand into new lines of business. That’s made
military contracts enticing to Google’s leadership, which sees
defense work as an important stepping stone to more busi-
ness in the $200 billion market for cloud services. Google’s
more idealistic employees are alarmed by this and see the
company drifting from its old “don’t be evil” ethos.
Several months after walking away from Maven, Googledeclinedtobidona $10billioncontract,JEDI.(Thegratuitous
Star Wars reference stands for Joint Enterprise Defense
Infrastructure.) But it was working furiously to repair its rela-
tionship with the Defense Department. This spring executives
from its cloud computing division held a series of dinner par-
ties in Washington, inviting current and former employees
from national security agencies. “Their message was, ‘We’ve
got a bad rap. We want to work with you,’ ” says James Lewis
of the Center for Strategic & International Studies and a din-
ner party guest. Google also ran a Super Bowl ad highlighting
a search engine feature that can help veterans find jobs.
Sitting next to General Shanahan onstage, Walker contin-
ued the charm offensive, recounting his experience growing
up on military bases and expressing frustration that anyone
would question his employer’s commitment to national secu-
rity. “That was a decision focused on a discrete contract,” he
said, referring to Google’s pulling out of Project Maven. It was
“not a broader statement about our willingness or history of
working with the Department of Defense.” Google declined
to make Walker or other executives available for this article,
which is based on interviews with a dozen current and for-
mer Google employees and 20 people close to the military’s
work on AI, as well as other military contractors and activ-
ists at other companies.
Shanahan professed himself—and, by extension, the
Pentagon as a whole—satisfied with Google, a message echoed
privately by military figures. A senior Defense official says the
company is actively pursuing contracts issued by the JAIC. But
mistrust remains. Portions of the company’s employee base
are in a state approaching open rebellion, and senior military
officials worry that Google is susceptible to pressure. In pass-
ing conversation, officers joke about canceling their Gmail
accounts to avoid aiding the enemy. “I don’t know who they’d
put on a defense project,” says a Senate aide, expressing a con-
cern that Google employees aren’t supportive enough of the
U.S. government to be reliable. “Frankly, I don’t trust them.”It’s easy to trace any novel political controversy to Trump,
but Google reached a subtler turning point a year and a half
before the 2016 election. On April 23, 2015, Amazon.com
Inc. first disclosed the financial performance of its cloudPREVIOUS SPREAD: PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY 731; PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES“They basically acquiesced
to a woke segment of
their workforce”