Google cooperated with the Israeli military immediately after its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, trying to get ahead of Amazon in providing artificial intelligence services. This is evidenced by company documents obtained by the Washington Post.
A few weeks after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, employees of Google’s cloud division worked directly with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) – even though the company told both the public and its own employees that Google only works with civilian government ministries.
A few weeks after the war broke out, an employee of Google’s cloud division granted requests from the IDF military for access to Google’s artificial intelligence technology. In another document, the employee warned that Google should respond quickly to military requests, otherwise Israel would turn to Amazon for its cloud computing needs. In a November 2023 document, an employee thanks a colleague for handling an IDF request. A few months later, the staff requested additional access to artificial intelligence tools for the IDF.
Against this backdrop, Google has been punishing employees for protesting Project Nimbus, Israel’s $1.2 billion contract for cloud computing services from Google and Amazon. Google fired 28 employees who staged sit-ins at the company’s offices in New York and California, some of whom were also arrested during the demonstrations.
At the same time, Google denied that it was cooperating with the Israeli military.
“We have made it very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads run on our commercial cloud by ministries of the Israeli government that agree to abide by our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy,” Anna Kowalczyk, external communications manager for Google Cloud, said in April 2024. “This work is not aimed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads involving weapons or intelligence services,” Kowalczyk said.
Google has not commented on this information.
Source: The Verge
Spelling error report
The following text will be sent to our editors: