Google Won't Bid For The $10B Department Of Defense Cloud Project

Bids for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud project -- also known as JEDI -- are due Friday, but Google won’t be one of the contractors bidding on the $10 billion project.

The contract to build cloud services for the Department of Defense could last for 10 years.

There are portions of the contract out of the scope of Google’s government certification, and executives said they could not be assured the project did not conflict with its corporate values on the ways it has agreed to use artificial intelligence, a company spokesperson told Bloomberg.

The decision comes as no surprise. Earlier this year, Google said it would not renew the AI contract with the defense department. Company executives were concerned that the technology would be used for warfare.

Employees also signed a petition, and some even resigned, over Google’s involvement. They were concerned about Project Maven, an effort to build AI for the Department of Defense to analyze drone video footage that may have been used to target drone strikes.

Google in June announced it would not renew the contract once it expired. The same month the search giant released a set of principles for its work in AI.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post published in June that the company would not work on weapons or other technologies that would cause or directly facilitate injury to people. It also would not work on technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms, and technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.

Amazon, the favored, Microsoft, International Business Machines, and Oracle are still in the running for the contract.

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