Google Wants More Work from the Defense Department
Google Wants More Work
from the Defense Department
A senior vice president
ruled out working directly on weapons programs, but said other areas are fair
game.
If you thought that
Google was getting out of the national security
business, think again. The company’s senior vice president for global affairs
said Tuesday that the search giant has Pentagon contracts to work on
cybersecurity, business automation, and deepfake detection — and is looking
for more.
“It’s been frustrating,” said
Google’s Kent Walker, referring to rising public perceptions that the company
is opposed to doing national security work — and to the narrative pushed by some Google rivals, such as
Palantir’s Peter Thiel and their allies in Congress, such as Rep. Josh
Hawley, R-Missouri.
Speaking at the National
Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence conference, Walker said that
Google is “fully engaged in a wide variety of work with different agencies”
within the Defense Department. Its work with the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center
includes cybersecurity, healthcare, and business automation. It is working
with DARPA to “ensure the robustness of AI” and “progress the operation of hardware” beyond the expiration of Moore’s Law.
“As we take on those kind of
things, we are eager to do more, [and are] pursuing actively additional
certifications” to provide cloud services for classified
data and other services, he said.
Walker stopped short of
saying that Google would work again on the Air Force’s Project Maven, the AI-infused
intelligence program that led to employee protests and some
resignations. But he did say that Google’s 2018 decision to leave the program
was focused on “a discrete contract, not a broader statement about our
willingness or our history about working with the Department of Defense.”
Rather, he said, Google had decided “to press the reset button until an
opportunity to develop our own set of AI principles,
our own work on internal standards and review processes.”
JAIC leader
Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan described the public relations issues surrounding Maven
as a “canary in a coal mine.” Shanahan said Google and the military lost the
narrative, in part, because the company wasn’t fully transparent with its
employees about its participation. “The company made a strategic decision” not
to talk about what they were doing, he said at the conference. That, in part,
led to confusion and a lot of faulty coverage about what Project Maven
was. “It was not a weapons project. It is not
a weapons project,” he emphasized.
On the subject of weapons,
specifically, Walker said, “It’s a nascent technology. We want to be very, very
careful about the application of AI in this
area. So that’s not an area that we’re pursuing, given
our background.”
Walker also put in a plug for
the newly released Defense Innovation
Board principles on artificial intelligence, calling it a “thoughtful
document,” in line with guidelines that Google had published, but with greater
emphasis on process. “The report devotes a couple of pages to the
principles and a long section to implementation,” he said, calling that
critical to help large organizations build safety standards and processes
for AI tools.
Michael C. Horowitz, a political
science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Defense One in a
direct message, “Walker’s comments show that Google wants to turn the page
after the Project Maven controversy. They signal that Google, a key leader
in AI research, is willing to partner with
the US national security community on
applications of AI.”
Horowitz said Walker’s
statements “seem to represent an evolution of thinking at Google. They signal
that more cooperation between the Defense Department and Silicon Valley on AI may soon become a reality.”
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