TRUMP SEES RED

Says he’ll pursue Thiel’s tech gripe

President Trump said his administration will probe Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel’s claims that Google has “seemingly treasonous” ties with China.

Trump signaled there will be a US investigation after Thiel over the weekend suggested that Google has been actively working with the Chinese military instead of the US armed forces — and that top management has become a hotbed for Chinese spies.

In a Tuesday morning tweet, Trump called Thiel — a libertarian tech tycoon who helped bankroll Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign — a “great and brilliant guy who knows this subject better than anyone,” and said the “Trump Administration will take a look!”

A few hours later, Trump told reporters he is asking US Attorney General William Barr to “see if there is any truth” to Thiel’s accusations.

In a Sunday speech before the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, Thiel said Google should be investigated by the FBI and CIA “in a not excessively gentle manner.” He didn’t provide any evidence for his concerns, but urged US intelligence to ask the search giant three questions.

“Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI?” Thiel said, likening Google parent Alphabet’s DeepMind artificial-intelligence project to the secret US program that developed the atomic bomb.

Thiel said Google also should be grilled over whether its senior management has been “thoroughly infiltrated” by Chinese spies and whether they were working with China because they believed the tech would be stolen anyway.

Under pressure from its own employees, Google last summer pledged that it would not use AI 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.

The speech echoed a Trump tweet in March accusing Google of “helping China and their military, but not the US. Terrible!”

Google in 2017 opened a research lab for AI in Beijing, a move that attracted controversy among the firm’s employees as well as US politicians.

Google said Monday that it does not work with the Chinese military.

Shares of Alphabet rose $2.95 Tuesday to $1,153.46.

POSTER PLOY: The president is doubling down on Peter Thiel’s claim that tech juggernaut Google, co-founded by Larry Page (left), is being compromised by Chinese spies.