A Google employee said she was forced to resign over criticism of the company’s secret AI project with the Israeli government, worth $1.2 billion. Gizmodo reports this.
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A Google marketing manager Ariel Koren said she had ‘no choice but to leave the company’. According to her, she faced retaliation and ‘illegal actions’ by the tech giant.
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Earlier, Koren had created several petitions calling the company to drop the contract known as Project Nimbus. More than 800 Google employees and 37,500 members of the public signed one of them.
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Details about Project Nimbus are scarce. According to some reports, it is a joint project between Google and Amazon that would provide AI and cloud tools to the Israeli government and its military.
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According to Koren and other Google employees, Project Nimbus violates the company’s own AI principles. The tools provided ‘could expand Israel’s surveillance regime, racial profiling, and other forms of human rights abuses through technology’, they say.
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“Rather than listening to employees […], Google aggressively pursues military contracts and deprives its workers of a voice, silencing them and starting to retaliate against me and many others,” wrote Koren.
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According to the former employee, in late 2021 the company gave her a choice: relocate to the Brazilian office or lose her job. Koren says there was no reason for relocation, and the ultimatum was a ‘creative’ way to push her out without an actual firing.
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A Google spokesperson disputed the former employee’s words and said the company bans described workplace reprisals.
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“We have thoroughly reviewed this employee’s complaint — our investigation showed there was no retaliation,” the company said.
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A Google representative also backed Project Nimbus.
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“We are proud that the Government of Israel chose Google Cloud to provide public cloud services that will help the country’s digital transformation,” he said.
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A Google spokesperson added that the project is intended to carry out day-to-day tasks in finance, healthcare, transport and education.
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“It is not aimed at high-security or secret workloads,” he concluded.
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In 2022, Koren filed a complaint about unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board. According to journalists, the investigation found no wrongdoing.
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Earlier in July, Google removed from his post engineer Blake Lemuan, who had detected ‘consciousness’ in the LaMDA AI algorithm.
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In May, the tech giant fired an AI researcher for criticizing the company. The engineer challenged the claim that the algorithms could design chips more efficiently than humans.
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In April 2021, the head of Google’s AI division left the company after 14 years. His departure was linked to the controversial dismissals of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell — two leading AI ethics researchers.
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