around the world to power Google’s own products like Gmail, a service that,
for vast swaths of users, had normalized the idea of surrendering your data to
a company’s remote servers. But Google’s MO was building products that a bil-
lion people would use by default—not closing deals, managing contracts, and
customizing infrastructure for other companies.
Amazon had no such compunctions. In 2006 it began marketing a simple but
highly effective cloud computing platform to other firms, ultimately offering cli-
ents like NASA and Netflix on-demand access to computing power, including
storing and processing data. By the time Google finally offered a comparable
service called Google Cloud Platform, in 2012, Amazon was already leagues
ahead. In April 2015, Bezos revealed that Amazon Web Services had brought in
$4.6 billion in revenue the previous year and was on track to out-earn his retail
business soon. Google’s earnings call was the same day. The company reported
that 90 percent of its revenue was still from online advertising.
Around the same time, Google’s decision to take the moral high road out of
China was seeming more and more like a self-isolating move. Across Silicon
Valley, tech giants in search of growth were going after China’s then-680 mil-
lion internet users. Apple had been running an app store in China since 2010.
Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, had served censored search results since 2009.
Even LinkedIn was there. Meanwhile, Google watched as Chinese handset man-
ufacturers like Xiaomi sold phones that ran on an unofficial version of Android—
which meant no Google Search on the homescreen, no Google app store, and
no good way to make money off of millions of devices.
The problem wasn’t just that Google was losing a slice of revenue here or
there. For Google, these weaknesses in cloud computing and China triggered
an existential dread: They meant the company was losing visibility into the way
the internet was evolving and what the future would look like.
In 2015, Google embarked on a massive reorganization. Under a new parent
company, Alphabet, moon shots and side projects would fall outside of Google,
which would be more focused on making money. With Pichai as Google’s new
CEO, finding a new footing in China and cloud computing were among the
company’s priorities. One of Pichai’s first moves, for instance, was to hire Diane
Greene, a cofounder of VMware, a company that helped popularize an early ver-
sion of cloud computing before the dotcom bust. Greene would head Google’s
cloud division. But catching up with Bezos was going to require Google to reori-
ent. Buyers wanted dependability, not wizardry—and they wanted someone in
Mountain View to pick up the phone. And to make up for lost time, Greene would
need to go after some big clients.
I V.
ON AUGUST 11, 2017—THE DAY AFTER PANDEMONIUM AT THE GOOGLEPLEX
had prompted Pichai to cancel the town hall to discuss Damore—Google’s
executives entertained an unlikely visitor: secretary of defense James Mattis.
At headquarters, they met the retired general across a stately conference table,
with Brin, Pichai, Greene, and Walker on one side and Mattis’ crew on the other,
all situated in the latest-model Aeron chairs in a new shade called “Mineral.”
Mattis was there to talk business. The Pentagon was in the process of rekin-
dling its relationship with Silicon Valley, which had grown up out of military
contract work in the 1950s and ’60s. The rise of artificial intelligence made a
potential relationship once again seem mutually beneficial. In recent years,
partly at the urging of tech executives like Schmidt, the Pentagon had begun
pursuing contracts to modernize its digital infrastructure. But before the
Pentagon could fully partake in AI and machine learning, the department had
to label its stockpiles of data and move it to the cloud.
At the time of Mattis’ visit, Google was reportedly in the process of bidding for
a project that would jump-start this transi-
tion. It was called the Algorithmic Warfare
Cross-Functional Team, otherwise known
as Project Maven. The project would involve
labeling past drone footage to train a com-
puter vision algorithm so that, once every-
thing was in the cloud, new drone footage
could be analyzed automatically. Though it
was a relatively small contract, Maven rep-
resented an important potential prize for
Google. Greene had recently boasted that
Google Cloud, which according to analysts
had 5 percent market share at the time, could
be bigger than Amazon by 2022. Federal
contracts offered a quick way to get there.
Maven could put Google on the fast track
to receive the security clearances it needed
to win more lucrative defense and intelli-
gence agency contracts, like Joint Enterprise
Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), a massive
Pentagon cloud contract that was worth
some $10 billion—if any cunning competitor
could wrestle it away from Bezos.
Google, Amazon, and IBM were all in the
running for the Maven contract. But Google
was an especially furtive competitor. The
company quietly put in a bid via a contractor,
and it prohibited the Pentagon from men-
tioning Google without prior approval. As
Google seemed to close in on winning the
contract, executives from the cloud team
pondered how a deal with the Pentagon—
especially one that could be linked to auton-
omous weapons—might reflect on Google’s
non-evil brand. In September, a few weeks
after the meeting with Mattis, they dis-
cussed spinning up some positive PR that
would focus on the “vanilla cloud technol-
ogy” aspects of the Maven contract. “Avoid
at ALL COSTS any mention or implication
of AI,” wrote Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor
and Google Cloud’s chief scientist for AI. Li
had not been involved in the Maven contract,
but she was concerned about the hype and
confusion building around AI in the public
imagination. “Weaponized AI is probably one
of the most sensitized topics of AI—if not THE
most. This is red meat to the media to find all
ways to damage Google.”
Li was right to be concerned about how
Maven might be received, but the media was
not the only group she had to worry about.
When Google won the Maven contract in
late September, the company opted not to
say anything at all—even to its own employ-
ees. But it wasn’t long before Liz Fong-Jones