Did Google sell AI tools to Israeli military during war on Gaza?

Google employees have been involved in providing Israel’s military with access to the company’s latest artificial intelligence technology since the early weeks of the Gaza conflict, according to a Tuesday report in the US media.

Internal documents, as reported by The Washington Post, suggest that Google directly assisted Israel’s Defence Ministry and military, despite the company’s public efforts to distance itself from Israel’s national security apparatus after protests from employees against a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.  

Last year, Google employees in the United States protested at offices in New York, California, and Seattle against a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government, which led to the dismissal of 50 employees. 

The contract, known as Project Nimbus, was signed in 2021 between Google and Amazon to provide cloud computing infrastructure, AI, and other technology services to the Israeli government and military.  

This has drawn condemnation, with critics labelling Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide. 

Workers have long called for transparency about how their work is being used, fearing that the technology may contribute to harm against Palestinian civilians.  

Similar protests have also occurred at Amazon and Meta over their ties to the Israeli military.  

According to WaPo, in the aftermath of the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza in 2023, one Google employee in the cloud division escalated requests for increased access to AI technology for Israel’s Defence Ministry. 

The report also indicated that Israel’s military wanted to expand its use of Google’s Vertex AI service to apply algorithms to its data. 

WaPo reported that the documents suggest that if Google failed to provide access, the military might turn to Amazon, a competitor that also works under the Nimbus contract. 

However, the report also stated that the documents do not clarify how the AI technology might have been used in military operations.  WaPo claimed that even as recent as November 2024, a time when there had been a severe disproportionate increase in the civilian death toll in Gaza, Google continued to provide AI technology to the Israeli military, including a request for access to its Gemini AI technology to develop an AI assistant for processing documents and audio. 

Israeli authorities and the military have yet publicly responded to the latest allegations. 

Activists and legal experts have voiced concerns over Israel’s use of AI to target Palestinians, with some suggesting that it violates international law.  

No Tech for Apartheid, a leading activist group campaigning against Project Nimbus, has called on Google and Amazon workers to oppose the contract, stating on its website that “technology should be used to bring people together, not enable apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler-colonialism.” 

In October 2021, over 90 Google workers and more than 300 at Amazon signed an open letter, which was published by UK publication The Guardian, expressing concerns over Project Nimbus.  

Some employees, like Eddie Hatfield, have publicly opposed the project, with him even being fired after speaking out at a conference in New York. 

Many have credited Hatfield for sparking the 2024 protests against Project Nimbus. 

The scrutiny of Israel’s military intelligence practices is growing, especially following genocide charges filed by South Africa against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the issuance of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This has led to questions on whether AI software played a role in targeting decisions during the Gaza bombing campaign- intensifying global discussions about the use of AI technology in warfare.