The United States is dangerously behind in artificial intelligence critical to its future including national security, according to a commission that includes a former head of Google and the future chief of Amazon. A report released by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence called for the country to invest $40 billion to win a strategic AI competition with China. "America is not prepared to defend or compete in the AI era," ex-Google chief Eric Schmidt and former US deputy secretary of defense Robert Work said in a letter included with the 756-page report. "This is the tough reality we must face," the chairs of the commission said in the report released late Monday. The commission formed by Congress in 2018 is made up of technologists, national security professionals, business executives, and academic leaders including Oracle chief executive Safra Katz, an Andrew Jassy, who will take over head of Amazon later this year.

Hundreds of Google employees have signed an open letter published Tuesday on Medium demanding that the company cease work on Project Dragonfly, which is aimed at creating a search engine that the Chinese government would be able to control to censor certain results and surveil users. "International human rights organizations and investigative reporters have also sounded the alarm, emphasizing serious human rights concerns and repeatedly calling on Google to cancel the project," the letter reads in part. "So far, our leadership's response has been unsatisfactory." Google has kept much of Project Dragonfly under wraps, but news outlets like the Intercept have obtained documents revealing some of the details. The search engine reportedly would block websites having to do with democracy and political dissidents and also blacklist terms like "human rights." One of the prototypes also reportedly has the capability to link searches to users' phone numbers.