Google will not compete for a $10 billion opportunity to build the Defense Department’s cloud computing contract, the company said Tuesday, saying the project could conflict with its corporate values regarding the use of artificial intelligence.
WASHINGTON — Google will not compete for a $10 billion opportunity to build the Defense Department’s cloud computing contract, the company said Tuesday, saying the project could conflict with its corporate values regarding the use of artificial intelligence.
The contract, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI for short, calls for a massive cloud computing infrastructure that can handle classified U. S. military data and enable new defense capabilities. Bids are due Oct. 12.
In a statement to The Washington Post, Google said it is dropping its bid for ethical reasons and because it lacked certain government certifications. The move was first reported by Bloomberg News.
„We are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI principles and second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications,“ a Google spokesperson said in the statement, adding that the company works with the U. S. government in many areas. „We will continue to pursue strategic work to help state, local and federal customers modernize their infrastructure and meet their mission critical requirements.“
Google is undergoing a broader reckoning over how the company’s artificial intelligence algorithms, which are some of the most advanced in the world, should be applied to the work of national defense. In early June the company said it would drop out of a Defense Department project to apply its artificial intelligence algorithms to analyzing drone video, saying it would not apply for follow-on awards when its contract expires next year. The move followed pressure from employees who objected to the company’s involvement in a controversial and long-standing drone war.
The contract, known as Project Maven, is designed to automate the analysis of surveillance footage collected by U. S. military drones, a task that has for years been handled directly by the Air Force. But Google Cloud chief executive Diane Greene said at the time that the company could not control the „downstream uses“ of the technology. The company later said it would ban the development of AI software that can be used in weapons systems.
„We do believe that the uses of our cloud and AI will prove to be overwhelmingly positive for the world and we also recognize that we can not control all downstream uses of our technology,“ Greene wrote.
The JEDI cloud contract would potentially have a much broader exposure to the Pentagon’s advanced weapons systems. The Pentagon already offers individual clouds, many of them built in secret to enable classified military programs.
Top Pentagon officials have said the JEDI contract would account for about 16 percent of the department’s overall cloud computing work, subsuming many of the Defense Department’s existing cloud efforts. They have also said the JEDI cloud would be used as a springboard for not-yet-developed military systems.
Developing the system „will revolutionize how we fight and win wars,“ Defense Department chief information officer Dana Deasy said in a recent interview.
In its statement announcing it would not bid on the contract, Google also joined a chorus of commercial technology companies in criticizing the Pentagon’s decision to award the contract to just one vendor, saying that „multicloud“ approach would have allowed the department to better match different solutions to different workload. IBM, Microsoft and Oracle have sharply criticized the Pentagon’s approach and even mounted lawsuits seeking to overturn it, arguing that the project is unfairly tilted in Amazon’s favor. Amazon has said it favors the single-cloud approach for the JEDI contract. (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
„Had the JEDI contract been open to multiple vendors, we would have submitted a compelling solution for portions of it,“ a Google spokesperson said. „At a time when new technology is constantly becoming available, customers should have the ability to take advantage of that innovation.“
