Google has reportedly worked directly with the Israeli military on artificial intelligence tools

According to the company, Google cooperated with the Israeli military in the immediate aftermath of the land invasion of Gaza, racing against Amazon to provide artificial intelligence services documents obtained by Washington Post Office.

In the weeks after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, employees of Google’s cloud division worked directly with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) – even though the company told both the public and its employees that Google only worked with civilian government ministries, according to documents supposedly show.

According to the report, weeks after the war began, a Google cloud employee escalated the IDF’s requests for access to Google’s artificial intelligence technology. Lent. In another document, an employee warned that Google must respond quickly to the military’s requests or Israel will turn to Amazon for its cloud computing needs. In the November 2023 document, the employee thanks a colleague for considering the IDF’s request. A few months later, employees asked the IDF for additional access to AI tools.

As a result, Google punished employees for protesting Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion Israeli contract for Google and Amazon cloud computing services. Google fired 28 employees who organized sit-in protests at the company’s offices in Modern York and California, and some of them were also arrested during the demonstrations.

At the same time, Google denied that it cooperated with the Israeli military. “We have made it clear that the Nimbus contract covers workloads run on our commercial cloud by Israeli ministries that agree to abide by our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy,” said Anna Kowalczyk, external communications manager at Google Cloud Edge in April 2024. “This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified or military-related weapons or intelligence-related tasks,” Kowalczyk said.

Google did not immediately respond Edgerequest for comment.