an “air gap”—a security measure favored by the Pentagon that physically sepa-
rates networks to protect sensitive data—and informing coworkers about their
efforts to thwart the project.
Fong-Jones hoped to pressure Google’s leaders using entirely internal chan-
nels, and at first things seemed to be working. Outraged employees began refer-
ring to the engineers as the Group of Nine, and executives felt compelled to
respond. On her own Google+ page, Greene tried to assure employees that the
contract was only $9 million and merely a “proof of concept.” Within 48 hours,
however, Fong-Jones says she received a call from a journalist—Lee Fang of the
Intercept—asking her for comment on her Google+ post. Someone had leaked. If
word got out, she feared, management would feel backed into a corner. So Fong-
Jones contacted Google’s security team herself. Let’s catch the leaker, she said.
Another staffer who was keeping close track of the internal rumblings about
Maven was Meredith Whittaker, a program manager inside Google Cloud.
In addition to her work at Google, Whittaker also helped run a New York
University–affiliated research center called the AI Now Institute, which stud-
ies the ethics and social implications of artificial intelligence. On February 28,
Whittaker drafted a petition for employees demanding that Pichai cancel the
contract. “Google should not be in the business of war,” she wrote.
At TGIF that week, executives were ill-prepared for the blowback. One
employee stood up and said she had left her last job because of ethical con-
cerns around defense work. Brin told her that Google was different, because at
least here she could ask questions. Whittaker’s petition netted about 500 sig-
natures that night and 1,000 the next day. It became a touchstone for a divisive,
months-long internal debate, inflamed by Google’s open culture.
There was no consensus on Maven inside Google’s fractious workforce, which
includes former Defense Department researchers, military veterans, and immi-
grants from countries under US drone surveillance. Even the employee group
for veterans was split on the project. But Maven’s opponents were organized in
a way that Google hadn’t really seen before. Employees fanned out into different
groups. Some scoured Google’s open databases, where they discovered emails
that appeared to contradict Greene’s statement about the size of the Pentagon
contract; they also found snippets of Python code for computer-vision technol-
ogy that seemed designed to track human beings and vehicles. Some churned
out anti-Maven memes; others kept track of employees who were quitting over
the contract. One activist group focused on fact-checking, listing every time they
found evidence to contradict the company line. The list got longer and longer.
Greene responded by playing whack-a-mole—locking down mailing lists,
deleting documents, or asking employees to redact Google+ posts. Longtime
execs were taken aback, and even hurt, by the loss of their employees’ trust,
which they had come to take for granted.
In March, Gizmodo broke the Maven story to the public. Inside Google, exec-
utives urged employees to reserve judgment; Google’s leaders, they said, were
developing a set of AI principles that would govern its business practices and
contracts like Maven. Employees should wait for those principles, which would
provide the whole company with a basis for discussion.
At another time, such a gesture toward self-regulation might have sufficed.
And plenty of employees were eager to change the subject. But the anti-Maven
organizers had momentum on their side—and support from an outside labor
organization called Tech Workers Coalition. They were also galvanized by a
powerful realization: They could reliably summon the rapt attention of the media
and the public, which were hungrier than ever for the vicarious thrill of watching
someone—finally—hold tech companies accountable.
On April 4, The New York Times published a story about Whittaker’s peti-
tion, which by then had gathered more than 3,100 signatures. Four days later,
at 10 pm on a Monday night, Whittaker received an email from Greene invit-
ing her to participate in a four-person inter-
nal debate about Maven, to be broadcast to
Google’s employees from Mountain View
that Wednesday.
Whittaker prepared feverishly. She
called up colleagues and a friend from the
Defense Department. She memorized drone
kill stats and read up on defense contract-
ing. On the day she flew out from New York
for the event, Whittaker learned that the
debate would take place three times during
the course of the day, so that employees in
other time zones could tune in.
Whittaker should have been outmatched.
Greene served as the moderator, and the two
pro-Maven panelists were both longtime
Google veterans. But they used many of the
same arguments that executives had recited
in recent TGIFs. The contract is explor-
atory. Maven merely uses Google’s open
source machine-learning software. Better
to have Google working on AI than a defense
contractor. Maven helps “our” military.
Whittaker, building on an analysis she had
been rehearsing in Google’s social networks
for weeks, argued that the ethical codes sur-
rounding AI were still largely unformed and
shouldn’t be defined on the fly in the context
of a business relationship with the Pentagon.
After the first panel, Whittaker paced back
and forth in the Googleplex parking lot, call-
ing up colleagues to ask how they would
have countered her remarks. By the time
the last panel ended, Whittaker’s energy
was zapped. She ran to her car in the pour-
ing rain, picked up some beer and peanuts
at a bodega, and went back to her hotel
room. Inside Google, people often look to
Memegen to gauge the mood of an unruly
workforce. On the day of the town halls,
most of the memes were pro-Whittaker.
On May 30, The New York Times published
a story about Maven that included the emails
Fei-Fei Li had sent to other executives about
weaponized AI. At the weekly cloud team
meeting two days later, according to details
leaked to Gizmodo, Greene announced that
Google planned not to renew the Maven con-
tract. The backlash, she reportedly said, had
been terrible for the company.VII.
IN EARLY JUNE 2018, PICHAI FINALLY
published the AI principles that Google had
promised its employees. They included a list