Earlier this year it was reported that Google had entered into a partnership with the US Department of Defense over the use of AI that would have been used to analyze drone footage. Google employees were reportedly unhappy about the project and protested it internally and signed a petition calling on Google to end the partnership.We’re not sure if all this backlash from employees and the public might have anything to do with this, but a report from Bloomberg has revealed that Google has apparently opted to drop out of competition in a $10 billion cloud project with the Pentagon. Dubbed Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), this project would have involved transitioning mass amounts of data from the Defense Department to a commercially operated cloud system.
The project is said to run for as long as 10 years and was valued at $10 billion, and Google was said to be one of those who were initially interested in it. Google has since confirmed that they are not bidding for the project and in a statement made by a spokesman, “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.”
However Google also noted that had the contract been open to multiple vendors, as in multiple vendors would work on different parts of the system, then this is something that they could have explored. “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.”
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