Google wants ‘more work’ with Defense Department, top exec says

Google CEO Sundar Pichai appears before the House Judiciary Committee in December 2018.

Google has no intention of leaving the national security business, despite perceptions in some quarters that the tech giant is against working with the Defense Department.

The search giant's senior vice president for global affairs said Tuesday that the firm currently has contracts with the Pentagon to work on cybersecurity, business automation and deepfake detection, and would like to have more, reports DefenseOne.

"It's been frustrating," Kent Walker said at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Conference in reference to perceptions that the company is against working on these issues.

Google set to end involvement in controversial Project MavenVideo

Walker reportedly said that Google is “fully engaged" in various types of work with different Defense Department agencies.

“As we take on those kinds of things, we are eager to do more, [and are] pursuing actively additional certifications” to provide cloud services for classified data and other services, he added.

After some of the California-based company's employees resigned in protest over its participation in the controversial Pentagon AI effort known as Project Maven, Google ended its role in the program.

DefenseOne reports that Walker said the withdrawal was actually focused on “a discrete contract, not a broader statement about our willingness or our history about working with the Department of Defense.”

He explained that Google had decided “to press the reset button until an opportunity [came] to develop our own set of AI principles, our own work on internal standards and review processes."