Google won't bid on $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing deal
[Photo: 12019/Pixabay]
The search giant has announced it will not submit a bid to win the multibillion-dollar contract with the U.S. Defense Department, reports Reuters. That contract, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud, or JEDI for short, would see a single cloud for all of the data the DOD holds. Google employees were reportedly not happy that their work could be used for military purposes, and now Google says its new ethical guidelines don't mesh with the project.
Announcing that it wouldn't bid for the job, Google said: "We couldn't be assured that [the JEDI deal] 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."
Those AI Principles bar the use of Google AI software being used in "weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people," in "technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms," and in "technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights."