Months after Anthropic took a stand against the Pentagon’s desire to use AI for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems, there’s activity at Google regarding the same. Over 600 Google employees, including senior leaders from Google DeepMind and Cloud divisions, have reportedly signed an open letter, urging CEO Sundar Pichai to reject a proposed Pentagon contract that wants to deploy the company’s Gemini AI model in classified military operations.
Echoing the causes Anthropic listed in its letter two months ago, the employees state that AI shouldn’t be used for “lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance”, with all other aspects extending beyond these.
“Currently, the only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms is to reject any classified workloads. Otherwise, such uses may occur without our knowledge or the power to the stop them,” states the letter.
The letter, which was first mentioned by Bloomberg Law, and is said to have been sent on April 27, 2026, has surfaced a growing internal uneasiness over the potential misuse of advanced AI in defence environments. The letter’s signatories include more than 20 directors, senior directors, and vice presidents.
Google employees concerned about inhumane use of AI
In the letter, employees stated that they are deeply concerned about the ongoing negotiation between Google and the US Department of Defense. “As people working on Al, we know that these systems can centralise power and that they do make mistakes. We feel that our proximity to this technology creates a responsibility to highlight and prevent its most unethical and dangerous uses,” said the employees.
“Therefore, we ask you to refuse to make our Al systems available for classified workloads,” they added.
The letter goes on to emphasise how AI’s power needs to be utilised for the benefit of humanity and not for inhumane or harmful purposes.
“Making the wrong call right now would cause irreparable damage to Google’s reputation, business, and role in the world,” states the letter. It is also emphasised that the safety of Google’s workforce and critical infrastructure is under active threat, and that the company’s technological advancements should not be used to put human lives at risk and threaten civil liberties.
“Today, we call on you, Sundar, to act according to the values on which this company was built, and refuse classified workloads,” concluded the letter.
Will Google pull off an Anthropic?
The requests seem to echo the demands made by Anthropic a few months ago, when the US Department of Defense wanted to access its Claude AI models for use in autonomous weapons and public surveillance. At the time, Anthropic stood its ground, leading the Pentagon to mark the AI company as a supply chain risk, which eventually led to a directive to discontinue all defence associations with Anthropic as far as AI technology usage was concerned. The company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, later filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon, challenging the ‘supply chain risk’ designation.
Not the first time for Google
The campaign draws direct parallels to the 2018 employee protest that forced Google to abandon Project Maven, a Pentagon initiative using AI for drone target analysis. At the time, that movement led Google to adopt principles limiting its involvement in certain military AI applications.
In recent years, however, Google has been rebuilding its defence-related business, competing with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft for government cloud and AI contracts. The company already supports non-classified AI workloads through the genAI.mil program and is now in talks to extend Gemini’s capabilities into classified domains.