This week, Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, saw its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok go Nazi. In the past three years of Musk's ownership of the social network, it feels like X has weathered at least one public crisis per week, more often multiple. Last week, Musk's artificial intelligence firm, xAI, saw its flagship chatbot Grok declare itself a super-Nazi, referring to itself as "MechaHitler". It made racist, sexist and antisemitic posts, which the company deleted. One example, via my colleague Josh Taylor: Grok referred to a person with a common Jewish surname as someone who was "celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids" in the Texas floods as "future fascists".

Fox News correspondent Gillian Turner has the latest on the president's focus amid calls for an impeachment inquiry on'Special Report.' Silicon Valley has started scooping up military contracts as the Pentagon turns to private companies to boost artificial intelligence (AI) development and adoption, according to reports. "This kind of change doesn't always move as smoothly or as quickly as I'd like," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said during a speech in December to a group that included start-up tech companies. The courtship between tech start-ups and the Department of Defense (DOD) started well before the public engagement with large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT: Saildrone, a start-up founded in 2013, had started developing an armada of AI systems to conduct surveillance on international waters in 2021. Alexander Karp, CEO and co-founder of Palantir Technologies, wrote an open letter to European leaders just weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine February 2022 and urged them to modernize their armies with Silicon Valley's help.

Google is reportedly pursuing a Pentagon contract that plans to use Artificial Intelligence and cloud technology to gain an edge in the battlefield, but the move is almost certainly going to stir a furor among employees and the public. Tech giants are no stranger to government and military contracts. The defense and federal law enforcement agencies have worked with the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM for years. However, Google's case is slightly different, and there's a lot of ugly history behind it, especially in the past three years. Following vocal protest from employees, the company announced in 2018 that it will not renew its artificial intelligence contract with the U.S. Department of Defense over Project Maven, formally known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT).

Google Cloud announced today that it landed a contract to supply Veterans Affairs hospitals and Defense Health Agency treatment facilities with AI for predictive cancer and disease diagnosis. The contract comes from the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a Pentagon organization that brings consumer technology into the military. "The initial rollout will take place at select Defense Health Agency treatment facilities and Veteran's Affairs hospitals in the United States, with future plans to expand across the broader U.S. Military Health System," a Google Cloud post reads. "The AI-based models used to assist doctors as part of the prototype were developed from public and private datasets that were de-identified to remove personal health information and any personally identifiable information. All patient diagnostic data will solely be managed by the individual hospital or provider."

If it seems like every week there's a new scandal about ethics and the tech industry, it's not your imagination. Even as the tech industry is trying to establish concrete practices and institutions around tech ethics, hard lessons are being learned about the wide gap between the practices of "doing ethics" and what people think of as "ethical". This helps explain, in part, why it raises eyebrows when Google dissolves its short-lived AI ethics advisory board, in the face of public outcry about including a controversial alumnus of the Heritage Foundation on it, or when organized pressure from Google's engineering staff results in the cancellation of military contracts. This gap is important, because alongside these decidedly bad calls by those leading the charge for ethics in industry, we are also seeing the tech sector begin investing meaningful resources in the organizational capacity to identify, track, and mitigate the consequences of algorithmic technologies. We are at a point where it would seem that the academics and critics who had exhorted the industry to make such considerations for decades should be declaring a small victory.

Devaki Raj leaned over a gilded railing inside Times Square's Marriott Marquis last Thursday, racking her brain to find the words that won't get her in trouble. Minutes before, she had stood confidently in front of a conference room full of investors, academics, military contractors, and Air Force acquisitions officers to deliver a slick pitch as part of the Air Force's first ever startup demo day. In her pitch, Raj explained how her company, CrowdAI, has mixed machine learning with mapping technology to identify flooded Texas roadways in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, or decimated buildings after bombings in Aleppo. The pitch, delivered to a closed-door crowd the day before, had already earned CrowdAI a small grant from the Air Force, which she hopes will soon blossom into a formal military contract. But now, Raj was finding it trickier to answer my questions about what this technology might be used for in practice by the military--or in war. When I asked if there are some applications of the tool that she would consider off limits, she said yes, but declined to name any in particular.

Employees at Microsoft on Friday demanded the company cancel a contract to supply its augmented-reality headsets to the U.S. Army, warning in a letter that putting HoloLens in the military's hands could "help people kill." Writing to chief executive Satya Nadella, more than 50 workers said the devices would be "turning warfare into a simulated'video game.'" They also urged Microsoft, which won the $480 million contract in November, to "cease developing any and all weapons technologies" for the government. "As employees and shareholders we do not want to become war profiteers," the letter concluded. "To that end, we believe that Microsoft must stop in its activities to empower the U.S. Army's ability to cause harm and violence."

Google will give away $25 million to projects that propose ways to use the artificial intelligence of computers to help create a more humane society. The grant program announced Monday is part of a broader Google initiative called "AI for Social Good" that aims to ease concerns that advances in artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs and perhaps even be autonomously deployed by militaries to kill people. Other technology companies have taken similar steps to address ethical issues in AI. For instance, Microsoft has committed $115 million to an "AI for Good" initiative that provides grants to organizations harnessing AI for humanitarian, accessibility and environmental projects. During a presentation in Sunnyvale, California, Google demonstrated how its AI technology is already being used to diagnose diseases, help people with disabilities, predict areas likely to flood and protect endangered species.

SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA – Google will give away $25 million to projects that propose ways to use the artificial intelligence of computers to help create a more humane society. The grant program announced Monday is part of a broader Google initiative called "AI for Social Good" that aims to ease concerns that advances in artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs and perhaps even be autonomously deployed by militaries to kill people. Other technology companies have taken similar steps to address ethical issues in AI. For instance, Microsoft has committed $115 million to an "AI for Good" initiative that provides grants to organizations harnessing AI for humanitarian, accessibility and environmental projects. During a presentation in Sunnyvale, California, Google demonstrated how its AI technology is already being used to diagnose diseases, help people with disabilities, predict areas likely to flood and protect endangered species.

Even as it pledges to do good things with AI, Microsoft is pursuing a massive U.S. military contract that prompted an open letter earlier this month from a purported group of Microsoft employees worried the company might be betraying its own artificial-intelligence principles. Microsoft reaffirmed its resolve to win the military contract in its own blog post last week, promising to address any ethical concerns that may arise if it ends up working on the project.