More than 600 Google employees have signed a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai, demanding the company refuse to deploy its AI models on Pentagon classified networks. The organizers say the signatories include a large number of Google DeepMind researchers, as well as over 20 directors and VP-level executives.
The letter states: "The only way to ensure Google is not associated with such harm is to reject all classified workloads. Otherwise, these uses could occur without our knowledge and without our ability to stop them." The core concern is that classified networks are air-gapped from the public internet, meaning Google cannot monitor how models are actually used or enforce any technical safeguards.
The immediate trigger for the letter was a report from The Information that Google is negotiating with the Pentagon to deploy Gemini on classified systems, with contract terms allowing the Pentagon to use it "for any lawful purpose." Google already provides unclassified-level Gemini services to 3 million Pentagon personnel through the genAI.mil platform. Emil Michael, the Pentagon's undersecretary for research and engineering, told Bloomberg in March that unclassified use is just the beginning — "next comes classified and top-secret levels."
This is the second major internal uprising at Google over military AI. In 2018, more than 4,000 employees protested Project Maven, a Pentagon program using AI to analyze drone footage. Dozens resigned, and Google eventually declined to renew the contract and established principles prohibiting the use of AI for weapons and surveillance. But in February 2025, Google quietly removed those prohibitions. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis posted the same day that "democracies should lead in AI development and support national security." Shortly after, Google won part of the $9 billion JWCC (Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability) military cloud contract. Meanwhile, Anthropic, which refused to relax restrictions on military use of its Claude models, has been labeled a "supply chain risk" by the Pentagon and faces a lawsuit.
Google is also reportedly close to releasing a new Gemini model — Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian recently teased that a next-generation version is arriving "very, very soon."