Google employees petition CEO to drop out of Pentagon AI project

Over 3,100 Google employees have signed a petition opposing the company's part in a Pentagon AI program. The letter asked CEO Sundar Pichai to pull Google out of the project, which harnesses artificial intelligence to analyze video and could improve drone targeting. Further, it urged him to establish and enforce a policy that kept the company or its subsidiaries from ever building "warfare technology." That could include a lot of things, but if this partnership is a baseline, said policy would include simply providing government agencies with Google's tech. Gizmodo broke the news last month that the company would lend AI TensorFlow programming kits to the Pentagon's Project Maven, and according to sources, employees were outraged that the government would use it to improve drone operations.