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Bloomberg Businessweek November 25, 2019meaningless because the intelligence produced by the
program could contribute to combat operations. “The line
from the company was that there was no lethal implication,”
Poulson says. “After that, the goal post was shifted,” he says,
adding that executives then argued that better data would
reduce casualties in conflict situations.
The debate over Maven brought more scrutiny to Pichai’s
unbridled enthusiasm for AI. Employees began pointing
out—in internal message boards and, sometimes, in pub-
lic on Twitter—all the ways AI could go wrong when used to
determine who should get a bank loan, to surveil the pub-
lic, or to categorize digital photographs of people with dif-
ferent skin tones. They saw Google trading in its original,
idealistic mission—“organize the world’s information”—for
something more mercenary.
The conflict centered largely on the company’s cloud unit,
which had financial incentives that differed from those of the
consumer businesses. “The question is, Who’s your user?” says
Meredith Whittaker, who worked at Google for more than a
decade and became one of its fiercest critics. “Back during
search, the user was an individual human, and Google built
its reputation around putting the user first. Now for the infra-
structure business, which is a cloud business, the user is oil and
gas companies, the user is the DoD. Those are lines of revenue
that are going to be hard to leave on the table.” By April 2018,
4,000 people—roughly 5% of total full-time staff—had signed a
petition denouncing Maven. A smaller number resigned.
Google attempted to appease its employees without back-
ing away from the Pentagon. Staff members and Defense
Department representatives held a series of meetings. Two
people who attended one of them recall a squabble breaking
out when Whittaker raised ethical objections to Maven. OtherGoogle employees began to argue energetically in defense of
the program. Watching a prospective contractor argue the eth-
ics of defense contracting was new for the Pentagon staffers.
“It was super awkward for everybody,” one attendee recalls.
Whittaker declined to comment on any internal meetings.
Publicly,Googlesurrenderedtoitsdissidents,announcing
inJune 2018 thatit wouldstopworkonMavenonceitscon-
tractexpired.Laterthatyearit announcedit wouldn’tpursue
JEDI, the $10 billion cloud computing contract. Amazon,
Microsoft, and Oracle competed fiercely for the business,
which Microsoft Corp. won in October 2019.
It’s not clear Google could have put forth a serious bid,
becausethecompanysaidit lackedsecuritycertifications
thatmostofits competitorshadalreadyobtained.But
anotherreasonitgaveforthedecision—thatJEDImight
violateitsethicalprinciples—reinforced critics’ view of
Google. “They basically acquiesced to a woke segment of
their workforce,” complains Republican Senator Tom Cotton
of Arkansas, a U.S. Army veteran who sits on the Senate’s
Committee on Armed Services.
Cotton says his office has communicated with Google
since it pulled out of Maven, but he doesn’t believe the com-
pany can convincingly commit to taking on other military
contracts given its internal dynamics. He argues that civilian
agencies should avoid dealing with Google as well. “I’d tell
them to turn around and get the hell out,” he says.
Other companies seem to have taken such threats to
heart. Employee protests have become a regular occur-
rence on tech campuses, but most major companies have
chosentoignoreanyblowbackratherthancancelwork
onpoliticallysensitiveissues.Amazonstillprovidesfacial-
recognition softwaretolawenforcement,andMicrosoft
hasn’tretreatedfroma plantobuild
augmented-reality headsets for sol-
diers. To executives at Google’s
competitors, its response to the
Maven protesters served as a cau-
tionary tale of what not to do.By this summer, Google’s protest
movement was showing signs
of strain. In July, Whittaker and
another prominent critic, Claire
Stapleton, announced they were
leaving the company after each
had complained publicly that it was
retaliating against internal critics.
(Whittaker by then was working at
AI Now, a nonprofit focused on eth-
ical questions related to technology.)
Google denies the accusation and
says it’s always fostered technical
and ethical debates. Yet its manage-
ment has taken a number of steps to
Googlers protested Trump’s travel ban in January 2017 counteract employee protests, and MORIAH MARANITCH/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP PHOTO