Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons, surveillance
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc., during Stanford’s 2024 Business, Government, and Society forum in Stanford, California, April 3, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Google has removed a pledge to abstain from using AI for potentially harmful applications, such as weapons and surveillance, according to the company’s updated “AI Principles.”
A prior version of the company’s AI principles said the company would not pursue “weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people,” and “technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.”
Those objectives are no longer displayed on its AI Principles website.
“There’s a global competition taking place for AI leadership within an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape,” reads a Tuesday blog post co-written by Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind. “We believe democracies should lead in AI development, guided by core values like freedom, equality, and respect for human rights.”
The company’s updated principles reflect Google’s growing ambitions to offer its AI technology and services to more users and clients, which has included governments. The change is also in line with increasing rhetoric out of Silicon Valley leaders about a winner-take-all AI race between the U.S. and China, with Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar saying Monday that “it’s going to be a whole-of-nation effort that extends well beyond the DoD in order for us as a nation to win.”
The previous version of the company’s AI principles said Google would “take into account a broad range of social and economic factors.” The new AI principles state Google will “proceed where we believe that the overall likely benefits substantially exceed the foreseeable risks and downsides.”
In its Tuesday blog post, Google said it will “stay consistent with widely accepted principles of international law and human rights — always evaluating specific work by carefully assessing whether the benefits substantially outweigh potential risks.”
The new AI principles were first reported by The Washington Post on Tuesday, ahead of Google’s fourth-quarter earnings. The company’s results missed Wall Street’s revenue expectations and drove shares down as much as 9% in after-hours trading.
Hundreds of protestors including Google workers are gathered in front of Google’s San Francisco offices and shut down traffic at One Market Street block on Thursday evening, demanding an end to its work with the Israeli government, and to protest Israeli attacks on Gaza, in San Francisco, California, United States on December 14, 2023.
Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images
Google established its AI principles in 2018 after declining to renew a government contract called Project Maven, which helped the government analyze and interpret drone videos using artificial intelligence. Prior to ending the deal, several thousand employees signed a petition against the contract and dozens resigned in opposition to Google’s involvement. The company also dropped out of the bidding for a $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract in part because the company “couldn’t be sure” it would align with the company’s AI principles, it said at the time.
Touting its AI technology to clients, Pichai’s leadership team has aggressively pursued federal government contracts, which has caused heightened strain in some areas within Google’s outspoken workforce.
“We believe that companies, governments, and organizations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security,” Google’s Tuesday blog post said.
Google last year terminated more than 50 employees after a series of protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon that provides the Israeli government and military with cloud computing and AI services. Executives repeatedly said the contract didn’t violate any of the company’s “AI principles.”
However, documents and reports showed the company’s agreement allowed for giving Israel AI tools that included image categorization, object tracking, as well as provisions for state-owned weapons manufacturers. The New York Times in December reported that four months prior to signing on to Nimbus, Google officials expressed concern that signing the deal would harm its reputation and that “Google Cloud services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations.”
Meanwhile, the company had been cracking down on internal discussions around geopolitical conflicts like the war in Gaza.
Google announced updated guidelines for its Memegen internal forum in September that further restricted political discussions about geopolitical content, international relations, military conflicts, economic actions and territorial disputes, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC at the time.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang introduces new products as he delivers the keynote address at the GTC AI Conference in San Jose, California, on March 18, 2025.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
At the end of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s unscripted two-hour keynote on Tuesday, his message was clear: Get the fastest chips that the company makes.
Speaking at Nvidia’s GTC conference, Huang said that questions clients have about the cost and return on investment the company’s graphics processors, or GPUs, will go away with faster chips that can be digitally sliced and used to serve artificial intelligence to millions of people at the same time.
“Over the next 10 years, because we could see improving performance so dramatically, speed is the best cost-reduction system,” Huang said in a meeting with journalists shortly after his GTC keynote.
The company dedicated 10 minutes during Huang’s speech to explain the economics of faster chips for cloud providers, complete with Huang doing envelope math out loud on each chip’s cost-per-token, a measure of how much it costs to create one unit of AI output.
Huang told reporters that he presented the math because that’s what’s on the mind of hyperscale cloud and AI companies.
The company’s Blackwell Ultra systems, coming out this year, could provide data centers 50 times more revenue than its Hopper systems because it’s so much faster at serving AI to multiple users, Nvidia says.
Investors worry about whether the four major cloud providers — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle — could slow down their torrid pace of capital expenditures centered around pricey AI chips. Nvidia doesn’t reveal prices for its AI chips, but analysts say Blackwell can cost $40,000 per GPU.
Already, the four largest cloud providers have bought 3.6 million Blackwell GPUs, under Nvidia’s new convention that counts each Blackwell as 2 GPUs. That’s up from 1.3 million Hopper GPUs, Blackwell’s predecessor, Nvidia said Tuesday.
The company decided to announce its roadmap for 2027’s Rubin Next and 2028’s Feynman AI chips, Huang said, because cloud customers are already planning expensive data centers and want to know the broad strokes of Nvidia’s plans.
“We know right now, as we speak, in a couple of years, several hundred billion dollars of AI infrastructure” will be built, Huang said. “You’ve got the budget approved. You got the power approved. You got the land.”
Huang dismissed the notion that custom chips from cloud providers could challenge Nvidia’s GPUs, arguing they’re not flexible enough for fast-moving AI algorithms. He also expressed doubt that many of the recently announced custom AI chips, known within the industry as ASICs, would make it to market.
“A lot of ASICs get canceled,” Huang said. “The ASIC still has to be better than the best.”
Huang said his is focus on making sure those big projects use the latest and greatest Nvidia systems.
“So the question is, what do you want for several $100 billion?” Huang said.
Microsoft’s Amy Coleman (L) and Kathleen Hogan (R).
Source: Microsoft
Microsoft said Wednesday that company veteran Amy Coleman will become its new executive vice president and chief people officer, succeeding Kathleen Hogan, who has held the position for the past decade.
Hogan will remain an executive vice president but move to a newly established Office of Strategy and Transformation, which is an expansion of the office of the CEO. She will join Microsoft’s group of top executives, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella.
Coleman is stepping into a major role, given that Microsoft is among the largest employers in the U.S., with 228,000 total employees as of June 2024. She has worked at the company for more than 25 years over two stints, having first joined as a compensation manager in 1996.
Hogan will remain on the senior leadership team.
“Amy has led HR for our corporate functions across the company for the past six years, following various HR roles partnering across engineering, sales, marketing, and business development spanning 25 years,” Nadella wrote in a memo to employees.
“In that time, she has been a trusted advisor to both Kathleen and to me as she orchestrated many cross-company workstreams as we evolved our culture, improved our employee engagement model, established our employee relations team, and drove enterprise crisis response for our people,” he wrote.
Hogan arrived at Microsoft in 2003 after being a development manager at Oracle and a partner at McKinsey. Under Hogan, some of Microsoft’s human resources practices evolved. She has emphasized the importance of employees having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, drawing on concepts from psychologist Carol Dweck.
“We came up with some big symbolic changes to show that we really were serious about driving culture change, from changing the performance-review system to changing our all-hands company meeting, to our monthly Q&A with the employees,” Hogan said in a 2019 interview with Business Insider.
Hogan pushed for managers to evaluate the inclusivity of employees and oversaw changes in the handling of internal sexual harassment cases.
Coleman had been Microsoft’s corporate vice president for human resources and corporate functions for the past four years. In that role, she was responsible for 200 HR workers and led the development of Microsoft’s hybrid work approach, as well as the HR aspect of the company’s Covid response, according to her LinkedIn profile.
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