Google won’t renew Pentagon AI drone deal

SANFRANCISCO•Google has decided not to renew its contract with a Pentagon drone program once it expires, after extensive protests from employees of the internet giant.

Diane Greene, head of the cloud business at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, told staff on Friday that the company will let the deal lapse when it runs out in March 2019, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Signed last September, the contract lets the Defense Department use Google artificial intelligence tools to analyze drone footage for an initiative called Project Maven. It was part of a major push by Greene to break into the lucrative business of selling cloud services to the government, where Amazon. com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. dominate.

“We’ve always said this was an 18-month contract that we did, so it ends in March of 2019. And there will be no follow-on to Maven,” Greene told cloud division staff on Friday.

The Pentagon deal sparked a huge debate inside Google, which has historically avoided most military work. More than 4,000 employees signed a letter asking to cancel the contract and demanded that Google and its AI technology should not be in the business of war. At least a dozen staff resigned over the issue.

Tech publication Gizmodo first reported on Greene’s statement to employees on Friday, which one source confirmed. A Google spokesman did not immediately return a request for further comment.

Greene’s division is also pushing for a much larger Pentagon cloud deal — the multibillion-dollar Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, contract.

Several hundred employees planned to hold a public rally in San Francisco in July to protest the contract, according to one source. Company officials have told employees in recent months that the small deal was seen as a gateway to further, more lucrative government work, the person said.

It was not immediately clear whether Greene’s remarks on Friday would alleviate employee concerns and if the rally would go ahead.

The company has said it would soon release ethics guidelines for future military contracts.