Searching for spies

Thiel asks feds to look into Google’s China ties

Google was accused of sleeping with the enemy again this week when tech billionaire Peter Thiel called on the CIA and FBI to probe the search engine for its “seemingly treasonous” ties with China.

Thiel, a venture capitalist and member of President Trump’s White House transition team, suggested in a speech Sunday that the tech juggernaut has been actively working with the Chinese military — and that top management has become a hotbed for Chinese spies.

The speech, first reported by Axios, echoed a tweet by Trump in March accusing Google of “helping China and their military, but not the U.S. Terrible!”

In his speech before the National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC, Thiel, a Facebook board member, urged investigators to ask Google three questions.

“Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI?” Thiel said, referring to the DeepMind artificial intelligence project being developed under the Alphabet umbrella which, Thiel said, should be considered a “military weapon.”

Google, co-founded by Larry Page, last summer pledged that it would not use artificial intelligence in ways that could be considered unethical, declining to renew a contract with the US military to use its AI technology to analyze drone footage.

“Number two, does Google’s senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?” Thiel asked.

Last, he said the feds should ask Google executives if they “consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military” because the tech would be stolen by China anyway.

Thiel did not give any evidence for his accusations, but said his hunch that Google is working for China should be investigated by the FBI and CIA, “in a not excessively gentle manner.”

“As we have said before, we do not work with the Chinese military,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC.

The search company came under fire last year after news leaked that it was working on a project to launch a search engine in China — one that passes muster with the Chinese government’s strict censorship requirement by blocking information about democracy, human rights and other taboo topics. Google ended the project in December after receiving blowback from employees, The Intercept reported in December.

Shares of Alphabet closed up $5.17 Monday, at $1,150.51.