Google has dropped out of the competition for a $10-billion cloud computing contract with the U.S. Defense Department, citing the potential conflicts with the company’s seven principals guiding how it will and will not use artificial intelligence.
The Pentagon is seeking a a tech company to help with a project dubbed the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud (JEDI), which “involves transitioning massive amounts of Defense Department data to a commercially operated cloud system,” according to Bloomberg. Bids must be submitted by Oct. 12 and the contract could extend for a decade.
Here is a statement from a Google spokesperson that was sent to TechCrunch about its decision to drop out of the competition:
“While we are working to support the US government with our cloud in many areas, 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. Had the JEDI contract been open to multiple vendors, we would have submitted a compelling solution for portions of it. Google Cloud believes that a multi-cloud approach is in the best interest of government agencies, because it allows them to choose the right cloud for the right workload. At a time when new technology is constantly becoming available, customers should have the ability to take advantage of that innovation. We will continue to pursue strategic work to help state, local and federal customers modernize their infrastructure and meet their mission critical requirements.”
Bloomberg notes that Google is trailing other big tech companies such as Microsoft and Amazon “in obtaining government cloud-security authorizations that depend on the sensitivity of data a service is hosting.”
The JEDI contract attracted widespread interest from technology companies struggling to catch up with Amazon in the burgeoning federal government market for cloud services. Final requirements for the project were released in July after a months-long lobbying campaign in Washington by tech companies including Microsoft, International Business Machines Corp. and Oracle Corp. that opposed the Pentagon’s plans to choose just one winner for the project instead of splitting the contract among a number of providers.
The decision by Google to back out of the competition with the Defense Department comes at a time when the company’s employees have become increasingly outspoken on issues that raise ethical concerns, including back in April when thousands of employees signed a letter protesting the company’s role in providing artificial intelligence to a Pentagon program aimed at improving the accuracy of drone strikes. In June, Google said it would not renew its contract with the Pentagon.
Google’s controversial – and secret – strategy to re-enter the Chinese market with a censored version of its search engine also recently ignited an employee revolt with demands for greater transparency on ethical issues. A former Google employee, who quit the company partly in protest of this secret plan – known internally as Project Dragonfly – sent a scathing letter to U.S. lawmakers urging them to question Google’s leadership about its operations – especially when it comes to oversight, transparency and data privacy protection.
Dr. Jack Poulson, who worked as a senior research scientist in Google’s Research and Machine Intelligence division, noted in his letter that Project Dragonfly had been “well underway” by the time Google CEO Sundar Pichai released the company’s AI Principles, which states in part that the company would not develop AI technologies “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
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